Slashdot Mirror

If you don't like ebooks, you can get used books for free. Many places have free bookshelves outdoors or in cafes where you can take and leave as many books as you want. (OK, mostly bestseller crap but I've found some gems.) There's also bookcrossing. Antique bookstores are nice for browsing, but I haven't visited one in years and I haven't bought anything there for more than a decade. To buy a specific book that's not available for free, bookfinder is much better than a brick and mortar store.

60% of the cost of publishing a traditional best selling dead-wood book is printing and distribution.

[[Citation Needed.]] Seriously, every reputable analysis I've ever seen (like this one from Money magazine) places that figure much lower.

That analysis by bookfinder is highly misleading (its just publisher PR). They are mixing fixed, upfront costs with variable costs. Of course, you need to recoup these fixed costs, but over time these costs go to zero.

From http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html (Slightly old)...
Based on a list price of $27.95
- $3.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
- $2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
- $2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
- $2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
- $4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Subtract the author's agent fees and self-employment taxes from that, too.
- $12.58 - profit for the retailer.

..

This is rather misleading. You are specifically talking about a new release. Over what time frame was this measured?

The "Pre-production" and the "Marketing" are largely fixed upfront costs. For the ebook you also don't need the wholesaler (why do you need a wholesaler to make the book available on Amazon, B&N and the Apple ebook store)?

So again, the only long term variable cost of a book is the printing...just as most people think.

60% of the cost of publishing a traditional best selling dead-wood book is printing and distribution.

[[Citation Needed.]] Seriously, every reputable analysis I've ever seen (like this one from Money magazine) places that figure much lower.

From http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html (Slightly old)...
Based on a list price of $27.95
- $3.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
- $2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
- $2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
- $2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
- $4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Subtract the author's agent fees and self-employment taxes from that, too.
- $12.58 - profit for the retailer.

In the case of an ebook, you're removing the $2.83 in printing.

You might be removing some of the wholesaling cost, but you might be using Ingram to do your wholesaling if you're a big company. If you're self-publishing, you might be using something like BookBaby or Smashwords. Yes, you can go to KDP and register your own book yourself, but if you're selling in multiple places or selling multiple books, you're going to use a middle-man to handle cataloging, recordkeeping, and listing things in multiple places. If it's more than $2.80 in headaches, you use a distributor.

Marketing, pre-production, royalties all don't change. (Or they get squeezed, and you get exactly what's going on right now, which is authors complaining "they don't pay us or market us or do a good job editing us like the good old days.")

As for that $12.58 of supposed profit, here's the interesting thing - Amazon doesn't sell books at list price. John Grisham's new book, The Racketeer, is an example. List price: $28.95. Yours for only $19.81 in paper.

I'm not saying that ebook prices should be equal to the price of a printed book, but removing the printing doesn't suddenly make a book cost a dollar or even five dollars.

Facebook:
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
http://www.joindiaspora.com/
http://www.myspace.com/

Amazon:
http://www.bookfinder.com/about/booksellers/

Skype:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VoIP_software

Twitter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr
http://www.plurk.com/

Apple:
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
http://www.ubuntu.com/

eBay:
http://online-auction-sites.toptenreviews.com/

Google:
http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/

I'm not currently in the US, the book isn't for sale here, nothing by him is in any library in the country (as far as I can tell from a couple searches), and Amazon wouldn't ship his book here.

Lots of Slashdot readers are non-US, myself included. Strangely I don't find that any limitation.

I am not personally familiar with regards to South America or the Middle East and Africa, but I'm guessing it's available via South Africa at least. Otherwise in 2 minutes I found new copies available from UK, Germany, and Australia. Hint, try meta-search sites for books such as http:www.bookfinder.com, AddALL, www.abebooks.com and www.Alibris.com.

Your accusations of vitriolous seem very harsh of someone, whom by Slashdot standards is being mature and respectful in his criticism. Other than in some no-fault divorce states or provinces, the law does seem to place an a priori burden on male (husband) in regards to both financial settlement and parental access/rights. I agree that divorce is something that is always emotional ugly as like most civil or family court manner, both sides view themselves as having been wronged, and too often there is little or nothing in the way of unbiased confirmation of either parties' claims.

Based on a list price of $27.95
$3.55 - Pre-production - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie piece to his agent, publicist, etc.
This leaves $12.58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer, however when was the last time you saw a bestselling novel sold at its cover price.

Assuming the previous is correct, your local Barnes and Noble has to stretch that money to cover all those incidental costs of running a physical, specialist store – rent, local taxes, utilities, sales taxes, staffing costs, benefits, insurance, stocking cost, inventory and so on. Their prices are a real kick in the pocketbook but I don’t think they’re exactly swimming in profits either. Indeed, a quick look at their wikinvest page reveals that

company-wide operating margin fell from 2.8% to 1.3% in FY2010

. My econ’ tends to be on the weak side, and correct me if I’m wrong, but that means they’re making a profit of approximately 1c on every dollar sold (couldn't find the figure for Amazon but it looks like Apple has an operating margin of 29.1% and Microsoft has 39%).

One of my favorite authors. They rereleased his stuff lately.

Amazon is usually a good place to start and failing that, try Bookfinder.com

Hi c0d3r, Try WorldCat http://www.worldcat.org/ for any library stuff like that - here's just one location of the manual http://tinyurl.com/yqqkl9 - you might have to have the physical copy snail-mailed as an inter-library loan to you. Want to buy your own copy? Go here for most out of print stuff - http://www.bookfinder.com/ - here's your truck manual - http://tinyurl.com/3x7q2y That took 5min :) thank god for Librari(an)s eh?

Paul Scudder's Electron Flow in Organic Chemistry is the textbook you want. It's all about electrons going from source to sink.

(New, the book is overpriced. Even the author thinks so -- he was complaining back when they raised the price to $30, and now it's $50. So get it used and send him a nice email if it helps.)

For books, http://www.bookfinder.com/ searches all the major listing sites )TomFolio, ABEBooks, Alibris), as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Almost any English-language book in existence can be found there, and there are many foreign bookstores there as well.

I am a partner in a small specialty by-appointment bookstore in Los Angeles with a strong web presence and average internet sales of about $75 per. We charge 8.25% for orders sent to California addresses even if they're in San Diego (7.75%), San Francisco (8.5%), or Salida (7.375%). Every year without fail we battle some library or museum that insists on paying their local sales tax. They're generally slow payers (not nearly as bad as film studios though) but when we fill out the tax forms in January they ask for 8.25% and we have a healthy fear of audits. Whether a California customer calls, writes, faxes, emails or orders through our website we charge the same as if they were in the store.

The majority of books offered for sale (although not necessarily the most prominently placed) on these mega online bookstores are owned, shelved and shipped by small independent booksellers. They collect the money and deposit it into our account minus their commission and we drop-ship the orders. An order can be shipped across town without the big boys ever seeing the book and without depositing a dime into the state's coffers. Our sale is to the ethereal, tax sheltered Amazon not John Doe.

WARNING - RANT It amazes me that perfectly rational geeks will allow themselves to be fleeced by these online Wal-Marts when they can go to a site like http://addall.com/ or http://bookfinder.com/ and pay up to 25% less for the same books often from the same seller. Our websites might not be as fancy but why order from an ethically questionable corporation when you almost as easily get the exact same thing and pay a little less dealing with an independent bookseller. Plus I think it's nice to get a personal email from a human being thanking me for an order.

And I know, because I sell science fiction first editions in my spare time.

One more comment for anyone still reading the comments to this article, this book by A. K. Dewdney (one of several who wrote the recreational column that replaced Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American, ISTR it was "Computer Recreations" when Dewdney wrote it) may be of interest, the full title of the book is "The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations." This book appears to be out of print, but many used copies are available from used/out-of-print sellers on http://amazon.com/ and through the book metasearch engine http://www.bookfinder.com/.

Also, I'm endeavoring to write shorter sentences than the first on in this comment.

... except the book "Lord Tedric III: Black Knight of the Iron Sphere" was first published in 1981.

...is that through resources such as Ebay, half.com, your local public library, garage sales and thrift stores, you can still get manuals for such things -- AND CHEAP! I found a PDP-11 technical programming textbook at my local Goodwill for a buck.

The Net is awesome for finding any used or out-of-print books or manuals of any kind - it used to take months to find something unusual, now it can be in your hands in a couple of days. Here are two valuable resources:

http://www.bookfinder.com/
http://used.addall.com/

You can do your own shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, finding the occasional RCA Receiving Tube Manual and such (I've done that a lot and now have about 10k books, including 20 tube manuals) but this is hit-or-miss for something specific. For a few more bucks per book, you can often find exactly what you want at one of the metasearch sites above or (if it has an ISBN number) used on amazon.com.

If you still don't find it, you can subscribe to this list:
http://www.bibliophilegroup.com/ ($30 per year subscription, two week free trial)
and send a WTB: (Want To Buy) post, where hundreds of used book dealers have large portions of their inventories they've yet to enter online, but may have it for you.

Computer manuals before 1970 or so are actually in demand and worth something (maybe $10-$25).

2) So, when are they making one for CD-ROM's?

You should update your computer to late-90's technology. I just bought a new CD-RW drive for less than $50 USD.

Getting out-of-print books is a nightmare,

It's gotten a bit easier since this Internet and Web thing started. Check out Bookfinder.com

but so it getting out-of-print computer games (read Core Contingency). I'd use one, a lot.

I've never tried to look for such, but if I did ... dare I suggest it ... there's almost surely an alt.binaries group on Usenet.

Try bookfinder, which is a search engine for used book sites.

Another point worth to be noted is that, under Un*x, the DLL Hell is a non-issue, as we've had libraries versioning since day 1. So, I might as well install multiple versions of a library, and yet do not have the need to recompile an application.

Unix versioning is based on sym links. Given that it doesn't look like sym links came into play until somewhere around SVR 3.2 which seems to have come from 4.2BSD (I base the "come from" on a diagram on page 5 of The Design & Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix OS), and Linux didn't get them until .95.

Now, I don't know what your definition of "since day 1" is but if it's 14 years (First Edition released in 1969, 4.2BSD released in 1983) then you're absolutely correct.

I'd also point you to the fact that Unix didn't have passwords on day one. They were added later. So much for security can't be added on, it's gotta be designed in. Not that you claimed that they did but it's an example of where Unix came from.

You see when Unix was designed it was a stripped down Multics. Multics was too big, too bulky, too much operating system with too many features. But if you look at the features of Multics we all have them on our desktops (and Unix systems). So Unix barely had anything from day 1. You wouldn't want to use day 1 unix today. Oh, maybe you'd find some level of nostalgia in it - it'd be like whipping out a Pong console - but you wouldn't ever make it your desktop, let alone attempt to install multiple versions of software on it.

I like Inside the Object Model: The Sensible Use of C++ by David M. Papurt.

He might mean "A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System", a series of many volumes. A google search reveals this link, which gives these isbns: 0-932764-07-X, 0-932764-06-1. I'm pretty sure there were 5 or 6 volumes in the series.

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

I have NO IDEA who Crazy Eddie is.

You do not read much do you?

Oops. wrong Crazy Eddie

Crazy Eddie's was an electronics firm whose owner played fast and loose with the inventory. Some low level managers realized that they could take a some money out of the company, without getting detected. They were deteced, but the head honcho figured that was a great cover for him to scam more. Between all the insiders grabbing money from wherever, on non-existent stock, and a flattening revenue line, things goot a little suspicious, for some investigators.

And so the head honcho was charged with a couple of felonies.

The rest is history

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

- adam

ABE used to be the online bookselling venue of choice, but that's before the new idiot management decided to impose a new commission fee structure on top of what their dealers were already paying, and kicking off those dealers who refused to sign the new agreement.

Information on ABE's new policies can be found here.

roght now, the best service to look for books online is bookfinder.com, which searches not only ABE (and Amazon & B&N if you want it to), but also more than a dozen other independent book-listing sites, including TomFolio.com, the site I currently list my science fiction books on (in addition to my own site.

Or go to Bookfinder.com, a meta-search whose list of booksellers includes ABE.

Or go to Bookfinder.com, a meta-search whose list of booksellers includes ABE.

I am an nth year grad student at UTexas-Austin. Here are my suggestions:

QED by Richard Feynman

QED stands for Quantum Electrodynamics -- the modern theory of how light travels and interacts with matter. It also stands for Quod Erat Demonstratum -- the phrase mathematicians use to show the successful completion of a proof. QED (the theory) is one of the most beautiful and precisely verified theories in all of science; the author is not only one of the principal architects of that theory but its clearest expositor. Feynman carefully paints a clear, physical picture of a mindblowing esoteric landscape populated by particles that spring into existence or annihilate into photons, taking all possible paths in order to find the 'natural' one. This is the best science book for a general audience I have read.

Any educated person with an appreciation and interest for science should enjoy this book.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1
by R.P. Feynman and R. Leighton

For the more serious and technical reader, the first volume of the Feynman Lectures serve as an excellent self-study textbook. Reading these books made me change my major to physics. I referred to them consistently well into my graduate studies, since they do the best job of describing a tangible, physical model of what is happening. For example, the chapter on conservation of energy does the best job I have seen of not only describing the principle but explaining the importance and relevance of conservation principles. Six chapters of this book are sold as 'Six Easy Pieces' -- but anyone geeky enough for Slashdot should spring for the real thing.

Any person with a technical background and college mathematics will enjoy and refer to this book -- especially as a supplement to lesser textbooks.

Nobel Lectures in Physics 1901-1921, pub. Elsevier 1967
Nobel Lectures in Physics 1922-1941, pub. Elsevier 1967
(possibly out of print; try BookFinder or similar)

Each Nobel Laureate gives a talk that is supposed to describe the science behind the prize at a general level. Most of them succeed in doing quite a good job. The science from these first four decades of modern physics is well described elsewhere, but these lectures give you a first-hand account that complements the textbook approach, and can be quite enlightening scientifically as well as giving a history, social, and scientific context.

All the heavy hitters are here:

Laureates in vol. 1 include Roentgen, for X-rays; Becquerel and the Curies, for discovering radioactivity; JJ Thomson, for discovery of the electron; Michelson (of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the precision measurement of the speed of light); Laue, and later the Braggs, for X-Ray diffraction; Max Planck, for the quantum hypothesis; and some dude named Albert Einstein (who won for his theory of the photoelectric effect but gave his lecture on relativity, which was understood to be more important but was still speculative at the time).

Laureates in vol. 2 include Bohr, for the structure of the atom; Millikan, for determining Planck's constant; Franck and Hertz, for verifiying Bohr's quantum model of the atom; DeBroglie, for matter waves; Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Dirac, for quantum mechanics; Davisson and Thomson, for demonstrating that electrons are waves as well as particles; and Fermi, for artificial radioactivity.

Any person who wants a first-hand account of the story and the science behind the great developments in physics will enjoy these books.

The Flying Circus of Physics by J Diamond

This book simply contains a series of single paragraphs, each of which describes an ordinary or extraordinary physical phenomenon followed by a series of general questions on that topic. (For example: Why are sunsets usually more colorful than sunrises?) Some conundra would make good science fair project for a middle-to-high school student, or amateur hobbyist; most can provide a group of geeks with solid dinner-conversation material as they puzzle out the answer. Even a physics professor will have to think carefully before answering each question, but they all depend on basic physics -- an elementary physics student with motivation has the tools to answer any given question. The back of the book contains a brief answer to each question and pointers to journals or books giving more information. However, the real value of the book is to make you sweat out the physics and sharpen your intuition, so looking at the answers is cheating (early versions of the book had none).

Physics majors or students taking college physics classes who want to plumb the depths of their understanding or find jumping-off points for independent study should get this book.

Let me first state that between books and magazines I probably spend about $300-$400 a month. When I travel the stores I check out are CD and book stores. When I go to New York my travel itenerary basically consists of arriving around 10 a.m. on Sunday, parking in front of Academy Records on 18th Street, getting breakfast and showing up when Academy's doors open thereafter filling my car's trunk with used CDs (relax oh keepers of the digital copyright--Academy is almost all classical and opera CDs, which rank very, very, very low in the Napsterizing and CD-R world. Find me someone that has copied Schabel's Beethoven recordings and traded in the orginals.) I then proceed to the Strand bookstore on 11th (?) & Broadway--a half-block sized warehouse of used and remaindered books. Then onto St. Marks place, for further used CD and used book purchasing. Then on to the West Village for more of the same. Oh, and if I get done fast enough, I can stop at Princeton Record Exchange on the way home.) Anyway, to make a long story short, I'm 33 and the only difference from when I was 10 is that back then I was riding a bike around instead of a car and I was riding around Hollywood, FL instead of NYC.

The reason the Writer's Guild's petition is so ridiculous is that used books shopping has been the regular course of behavior for book collectors back a few generations. Find me a real writer that didn't spend most of their pre-royalty check days trolling used bookstores and, likely, working in them. Particularly genre writers, who live in the places.:)

It was riding my bike around from store to store twenty years ago that I found the Lensmen and Skylark series by E.E. Smith, back before I realized they were unreadable. ;) Harlan Ellison's stuff, Phil Dick's surreal novels, Asimov, Clarke etc. etc. etc. When I got interested in politics, there for a buck a copy were Ted White's presidential campaign books, Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, history books by the hundreds.

I rememebr times my backpack was so weighed down with used books that I had to be careful turning corners that I wouldn't tip my bike over.

Used book shopping is completely ingrained in the book collector's behavior. Suggesting that used books be driven off of amazon is like suggesting that people shouldn't buy in thrift stores because of all the jobs it costs poor textile workers, and think of the manufacturing jobs lost in North Carolina when people buy used or antique furniture!! It's just silly--go to any writer's place and were did their books (at least the non-promotional copies) come from? Used bookstores.

Amazon's practice of selling used copies side-by-side with the new copies isn't even a new idea. Jeez, Powell's in Portland, OR has been doing it for decades--Amazon probably got the idea from Powells.

For anyone not familiar with Powells (and if you aren't you shouldn't be posting on this topic anyway): the fellow that owns Powells opened a book store in Portland after his son opened a store in Chicago. Dad didn't know much about selling books, and didn't know that used books are supposed to be shelved separately from new books. So he shelved them together. He also couldn't see how multiple used copies could be priced the same--the more copies that show up on the used shelf the less desirable the book, so each extra copy should be priced a little less than the one before it. So Dad went on his merry, stupid way. The main Powell's store now takes up a city block in Portland, burrowing its way through the existing buildings on the block in such a fashion that they publish a map of the store to guide you around its catacombs. Powell's and Strand are the Meccas of the East and West Coast for book nuts.

Amazon's sales look to me like just the Powell's system brought online, which makes some since as Powells is one of the online stores Amazon competes against. Other online used book sources are the Advanced Book Exchange, bookfinder and alibris. ABE and bookfinder are searchable databases of used bookstores around the country, which albiris is a (sometimes pricey) centralized fulfillment warehouse where people send their used books for sale (also used book sellers that have gotten tired of running stores or going from flea market to flea market just put their inventory there for sale.) I have purchased _many_ books through Powells and bookfinder. Too bad Portland is a little far from Philadelphia--wandering around the store is a great time.

Anyway, I've rambled on and on, but one final point, and it has been made earlier in the discussion--unlike digital media, there is no cost-effective way to duplicate printed media while turning the original into a used store. When you see a book in a used store, or on amazon's used lists, it means someone has deemed the book disposable and is relinquishing all interest in the book. Same as a table, or used car, or sofa, they're giving up the whole thing and the buyer has the only instance of that copy running back to the original purchase. The point? The only way used sales can make a dent in new sales of the work is if a large enough percentage of previous purchasers deem the book disposable and not worthy of keeping. If enough purchasers of your book believe it isn't worth keeping, then maybe you should loose out on some royalties! After all, I still have those Phil Dick and Harlan Ellison books I bought when I was 12 (nothing a 7th grade teacher likes more than seeing a student reading "Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled" during study period). I still have the same $2 used Book Club Edition copy of Lathe of Heaven I bought years ago after seeing the PBS movie. (Too bad I loaned the Lensmen books to someone that never returned them, and then bought the new printings last year when I was then old enough to realize they were unreadable!) The idea that someone who doesn't want a book should be stuck either a) throwing it in the trash or b) using it to get the fireplace started is offensive. Better the book should be taken to Ye Used Booke Store or sold through amazon to someone that want it.

By the by, I checked amazon and, for example, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which sold 60,000 copies just from Amazon pre-orders a couple of years ago, has a grand total of 72 copies available used--.12% of just the number pre-ordered from one source, amazon. Guild member Judy Blume's Blubber, which the Judemeister has been earning royalties on for 26 years, has a grand total of 22 used copies available. I think Judy's gonna make the car payment without a problem from amazon.

Bookfinder searches a bunch of other sites, and then gives you a bit list of new and used prices... Now, I buy most all of my older books used, both for cost, as well as environmental reasons.

I keep recommending these books to people I meet. It's wonderful literature; I keep saying it's literature, not deserving the restrictive label of "SF"; a good Strugatsky is the kind of book you don't fully appreciate until you have put it down, when its flavour lingers and you realize that, while reading it, your mind took flight, and that you're still flying a few days after.

It is sad, but not too surprising, to learn how unknown they are outside the literati (by which I don't mean the average Slashdot geek type with their Asimov and Trekkie stuff). The English translations are, as far as I can know, almost entirely out of print. Roadside Picnic was recently resurrected, at least in Europe, by Gollancz as part of their "Gollancz SF" series (instantly recognizable as trade-paperbacks with minimalistic yellow covers), a wonderful series which also includes other semi-forgotten masterpieces by the likes of Brunner, John Sladek, Heinlein, Thomas Disch and John Crowley.

Obtaining these absent volumes is not hard. ABE Books is your friend; basically it's a network of used-book sellers with a unified shopping cart -- it's an amazing system that has significantly added to my personal library. Books typically arrive by air mail within a week, even here in Europe (Norway). Also popular, but untested by me, is BookFinder.

There have been posts in this discussion, some serious and some not, about the readability/relevance of Russian fiction, comments pretty typical of ethnocentric Americans. I can't stress this enough: There is absolutely nothing that should prevent you from completely enjoying a Russian book (translated into English, to wit). The references to Russian culture/history/etc. are more or less nonexistent, and their stories are usually set outside the Soviet state. As for translations, most of the Strugatsky books were done by an extraordinary translator, Antonina W. Buois. I cannot vouch for their correctness, as I have not read the original texts, but I applaud their beauty, humanity, subtlety and ingenuity, qualities which I can only assume are also present in the originals.

As for what to read, I highly recommend Roadside Picnic, which is a masterpiece in any genre (it served as the inspiration for Tarkovsky's Stalker). It is about the aftermath of an alien visitation -- after the beings themselves have left and mysteriously, without having revealed themselves -- which has left the Earth riddled with small "Zones", contaminated by alien debris. One theme of the novel is that while we humans consider ourselves "rational beings", our sense of rationality -- a way of putting order to chaos -- is closely tied to our human form; an alien civilization may in fact appear beyond our capacity to understand, and therefore their nature will seem chaotic, irrational and impossible to us. The debris is wonderful stuff, often dangerous, often inexplicable, and humans scavenge it like ants over the trash left, as a character says, by a family "roadside picnic".

Their other works are similarly masterly: Far Rainbow, Hard to Be a God (actually made into a French-German-Russian-produced film in 1989) and Definitely Maybe. The latter's original title is, translated: "A Billion Years to the End of the World: A manuscript discovered under unusual circumstance". It tells the story of how one day all scientific progress is suddenly threatened by, well, hedonistic distractions. It was adapted into the film Days of the Eclipse (1988).

Many of the Strugatskys' books play out in the same "universe", or continuum, of the 22nd century, which includes several novels featuring intergalactic investigator Maxim Kammerer, and also developing the backstory of "the Wanderers", a mysterious, never-seen, incredibly powerful race of beings that seem to be silently following and manipulating the human race, similar to the Visitors in Roadside Picnic. The most chilling example is "Wanderers and Travellers", a hypnotic little short story about a diver who tags rare marine animals with radio tracking, and who then meets a man who suspects that, after a visit to a remote planet, he has somehow been... tagged himself.

On note: Alongside their SF production, the Strugatskys also produced some absurdist fables, including Tale of the Troika and The Second Invasion of Mars, and while this is great stuff, it's likely to shock and disappoint anyone looking for a "vintage Strugatsky".

• Bertrand R. Brinley's books:
• Rocket Manual for Amateurs - 1960 (nonfiction)
• The Mad Scientists' Club - 1965
• The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club - 1968
  "The six members of the Mad Scientist Club experiment with new projects which include making rain and launching a flying saucer."
• The Big Kerplop - 1974
  "When the mysterious object that lands in the lake they're fishing on turns out to be a bomb, a group of boys decide to find it themselves since no one pays attention to their story."
• The Big Chunk of Ice - unfinished manuscript

• Mark Maxham's MSC fan pages:
• general info
• etext archive FAQ
• Cease & Desist letter, reprint info

Ebay has had some decent auctions recently, but another good resource for used books is Bookfinder. Keyword/author = "Brinley" works well on either site.

This article is nothing more than Hegel rehashed. This sort of thinking is the same thing that led to National Socialism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and all the other despotic regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. rusty has fundamentally misunderstood Jefferson's words in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. If the rights of man exist purely as social construct, there is no reason at all to have any moral qualm with Nazism, the Gulag, the Laogai, or any other tyranny. Harry Wu is far better reading than this drivel.

Thalia

The exact quote is "Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic." which can be found on page 88 of Neal Stephenson's IN THE BEGINNING ... WAS THE COMMAND LINE

Go out to an old bookstore, or Bookfinder and dig up some musty old tomes that were published back before 1923 or so and aren't yet in Project Gutenberg. Original editions, not re-translations or re-issues, so there can be no doubt about their public domain-ness. Check with P.G. to determine their eligibility. Then scan 'em in.

I have a couple of old translated Arsene Lupin novels by Maurice Leblanc that I intend to scan in when I have the time. God knows they need more; they only have one, The Glass Stopper.

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Some links (which are not normally supposed to be bookmarkable, I guess) may become broken. Pick your favorite, and try them out with books that you're looking for in the future. Now all we need is a meta-meta-book search and you'd be set for sure!

Several copies online from $200 to $500. See Bookfinder.

NEVER buy a used book from Amazon.com. They double the price & you don't really get any choice as to the copy you'll get. GO to bookfinder & you'll get a better copy for less money.