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I speak to those who lawfully may hear:

Depart all ye profane, and close the doors.

The thoughts of a wise theology, wherein men indicated God and God's powers by images akin to sense, and sketched invisible things in visible forms, I will show to those who have learned to read from the statues as from books the things there written concerning the gods. Nor is it any wonder that the utterly unlearned regard the statues as wood and stone, just as also those who do not understand the written letters look upon the monuments as mere stones, and on the tablets as bits of wood, and on books as woven papyrus.

Fragment 1 from Porphyry's On Images

after finding Thea von Harbou's Metropolis at www.blackmask.com, I go there first when looking for an ebook, especially since they have them in e-silo format (Palm). IF they dont have what Im looking for I go by Project Gutenberg...

after finding Thea von Harbou's Metropolis at www.blackmask.com, I go there first when looking for an ebook, especially since they have them in e-silo format (Palm). IF they dont have what Im looking for I go by Project Gutenberg...

Check out Black Mask for a lot of nicely-formatted pubdom e-books, including many from Gutenberg but also some that Gutenberg doesn't have.

So how's that affecting Dover's business (Dover produces no new titles, apart from original translations of non-copyrighted work)? They're booming.

Heck, with those sort of results, Dover ought to be providing financial support for PG (or at least releasing edited/translated titles into the public domain). Though I guess I'll settle for that nice brief they filed in Eldred's behalf.

Slight disclaimer here, Dover was bought by a big printing company that's really helped them with distribution (just came back from the beach and all the little bookstores there were well-stocked with Dover thrifts), but every other publisher on the planet has seen sales fall, while Dover's sales, since the acquisition, have grown tremendously.

has any one tried those 'e-book' readers? are they easy on the eyes? is there enough material for it yet?

I dunno - is this enough material? Over 7500 free ebooks, and that's just one site. There are plenty of more modern pay e-books out there as well if you look...

-- Pete.

I scanned it in for my own site about a month ago.--scroll down a little, it's maybe the seventh book.

Text is public domain/not renewed, but Gutenberg didn't like the version I used (and doesn't like not renewed in general), so they wouldn't add it.

Interesting read--was written by Lang's girlfriend of the time, Thea von Harbou.

Tons and tons of e-texts. In multiple formats: text, pdf, lit, HTML.

Excellent resource!

The various formats do suck (I'm up to seven now with two or three more in the works)--

But it's not quite that simple: Gutenberg gets millions of visitors each month to their main site and various mirrors, while UVA, myself and a few others are in the hundreds of thousands.

People don't mind reading free books online, as long as the content's there (and you keep adding).

Bigger problem is, the market for printed books is predominantly female, while the market for online books is heavily male, so things like the old Rocket eBook (which was popular) were destroyed when the company that bought 'em said: screw it, we'll sell this thing on Oprah and dump the free library.

They're--the amorphous 'they'--not going to be shipping much in the way of hardware this year, either. (Franklin's eBookman was a failure that may result in the company's demise...)

But the number of people who read online does continue to grow rapidly. They're just not going to pay a lot for it (and they shouldn't... the public domain belongs to everyone, while authors should expect greater-than-hardback royalties on books sold at a less-than-paperback price.)

The various formats do suck (I'm up to seven now with two or three more in the works)--

But it's not quite that simple: Gutenberg gets millions of visitors each month to their main site and various mirrors, while UVA, myself and a few others are in the hundreds of thousands.

People don't mind reading free books online, as long as the content's there (and you keep adding).

Bigger problem is, the market for printed books is predominantly female, while the market for online books is heavily male, so things like the old Rocket eBook (which was popular) were destroyed when the company that bought 'em said: screw it, we'll sell this thing on Oprah and dump the free library.

They're--the amorphous 'they'--not going to be shipping much in the way of hardware this year, either. (Franklin's eBookman was a failure that may result in the company's demise...)

But the number of people who read online does continue to grow rapidly. They're just not going to pay a lot for it (and they shouldn't... the public domain belongs to everyone, while authors should expect greater-than-hardback royalties on books sold at a less-than-paperback price.)

(In my case, an AMD Duron, 800 mhz, 512 megs PC100 RAM), W2k (scanners crash 98 and my software sucks on NT), and a bit of software called Abbyy FineReader, (at http://www.abbyyusa.com)

you could scan a 200-page paperback book decently in about 3 hours--two pages at a time--then proof it for another hour or two, and it'd be close to good.

For an example, visit The Hand of Fu Manchu--pick your format--a 200 page paperback book I scanned in in about three hours (while playing Civilization). Note, I didn't proofread this particular text, as my 9-pound Chinese-American dog was looking at me askance whenever I did the spell check.

They're going to have to ban paperback books.