http://www.amazon.com/Arch-Linux-Handbook-3-0-ebook/dp/B0098R71V2/

Thank you for your purchase of this third edition
of the Arch Linux Handbook. Over 800 copies of
the Handbook have been sold since I first printed
Edition One in 2009.

People in FOSS should make a stand on sharing documents in a non-proprietary format, through non-proprietary sources.

Above all, they should also correctly attribute authorship – perhaps your biggest error in this instance.

It’s not a human right to have your book published by a company. They are trying to prevent the situation where somebody buys something that looks like a manual when it’s actually just copy & paste from a wiki. I’m not saying that’s what your handbook is, but it’s clear that there’s enough copying & pasting for an automatic search to catch it.

What’s more, I’ve actually contributed a fair amount to the wiki myself. As someone who contributed in the spirit of sharing knowledge, if you were trying to turn a profit on this, I’m glad you failed. If you want to sell an Arch manual, don’t be lazy – write it from scratch. You can reference the wiki in the book.

Amazon seems to be taking the stance that it will only accept books where there is no copyright holder for the original material (public domain) or where the rightsholder has ‘authorized’ your version. If the rightsholder can’t specifically give permission because of a license that allows anyone to produce a derivative work (GNU FDL) they won’t sell it.

This sort of reminds me of an article the other day about an Wikipedia refusing to change incorrect statements about an authors motivation for writing a book *at the request of that author* because they required secondary sources. The author had to write an article about his motivation, get it published, and then cite it on the Wiki page to get it approved.