Formatting an ebook for the Kindle is not something automatic. This is real work. If someone does this for me and then charges me 99 cent for "Pride and Prejudice", I have nothing against it.
Are they properly formatted for the Kindle, though? In the Gutenberg-derived version of Moby Dick that I read, they capitalized words italicized in the original, and replaced £ with L. Aesthetically displeasing, to say the least. I'd pay a dollar to avoid the bad results of storing masters in a lossy format (which Gutenberg's masters seem to be, although I'm not sure about this), but I rather doubt that this can be had for just a dollar.
Also, did you read the article:
"They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold,"
That does not exactly sound like strenuous editing and curation.