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Because hiding the meaning is precisely the point. It's not supposed to be a dissertation with a well supported thesis; it's a clever little puzzle that people enjoy composing and analyzing.

No, it is not. A poem is most certainly not a riddle, and any so-called poet who attempts to pervert poetry in such a manner ought to be keel-hauled.

A poem is an expression with emotional content, an attempt to illustrate or convey a state of consciousness. As Emerson tells us, "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune."

A poem does not "hide" behind metaphor, it uses metaphor a means of communication. Now, in order to understand a metaphor, you need some background knowledge about the metaphier; but that's not the poet hiding anything from you. When I say "Oh, that's like Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," and you don't know who Darmok and Jalad are, we have a communications fail, but not because I'm hiding anything. Maybe I shouldn't expect you to know who Darmok and Jalad, or maybe your education has been deficient, but there's no attempt to create a puzzle.

(Some recent thoughts about poetry here.)

Older books (as in pre-word processor) on Kindle (not singling out Amazon, I'm sure iBooks and other digital stores share the same problems) are flawed. I've read a bunch of reviews of older books and there are common complaints regarding frequent typos from OCR.

You're doing it wrong. You should download old books from Gutenberg directly. They're available in multiple formats, including Mobi for Kindle, and they're generally high quality and well-edited (even when they start from OCR sources). There's no reason to get old books from Amazon, and especially no reason to ever pay for those old books. That's how people scam -- grab a bunch of Gutenberg books, rip off the Gutenberg text, add a fancy new cover, and charge $2 on Amazon and other stores. Easiest money ever, because there are suckers like you who will pay for it.

By old books I am not referring to classical literature that is a century or more beyond copyright. I have downloaded such works for both Kindle and iBooks and they are also free. When I purchase such works on paper I tend to get academic oriented printing that add much additional material. For example my copies of the Iliad and Odyssey includes an extensive discussion on whether Homer was an individual person or if his works are from a series of authors spread through time.

By old I was simply referring to something that was created before people moved to word-processors and where the author's original work was not done in a digital media. Perhaps Frank Herbert's Dune (1965?) is a good example.

when I was 20 I scoured used book shops etc, even got very good deals on old rare books.

if you don't have those where you live, here is something that will add ~30,000 books of all kinds to your family library : http://www.gutenberg.org/

If you don't have one of those where you live, AbeBooks.com will get you access to used bookshops all over the world.

when I was 20 I scoured used book shops etc, even got very good deals on old rare books.

if you don't have those where you live, here is something that will add ~30,000 books of all kinds to your family library : http://www.gutenberg.org/

and all of them are free. there are a great many classics, browse, search etc that site for those kind of publications. only downside, few modern books..

Older books (as in pre-word processor) on Kindle (not singling out Amazon, I'm sure iBooks and other digital stores share the same problems) are flawed. I've read a bunch of reviews of older books and there are common complaints regarding frequent typos from OCR.

You're doing it wrong. You should download old books from Gutenberg directly. They're available in multiple formats, including Mobi for Kindle, and they're generally high quality and well-edited (even when they start from OCR sources). There's no reason to get old books from Amazon, and especially no reason to ever pay for those old books. That's how people scam -- grab a bunch of Gutenberg books, rip off the Gutenberg text, add a fancy new cover, and charge $2 on Amazon and other stores. Easiest money ever, because there are suckers like you who will pay for it.

found it: Gorgias by Plato

The only justication for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientfic thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless this universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are of the form of the human body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them and put them in a serviceable condition. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36276/36276-pdf.pdf

He sees empirical evidence as providing a ground from which reason can proceed legitimately.

This sounds like a job for Project Gutenberg, since this stuff is public domain. http://gutenberg.org/

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page is a god-send. Thousands of books to choose from, all free. If you like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, or any other old-time author, you never have to pay for these books.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Get your free ebooks here! No need to enrich Amazon and Apple if you don't want to.

Most of your rant (except the bit on weapons) was very clear and sensible, so thanks, keep up the good work :-)

See if this is of any value to you: Henry David Thoreau -- On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849).
Warning: language may be a bit difficult nowadays.

I realise your point is most likely about books under copyright restrictions, but thought I should point out that Project Gutenberg has been in operation since 1971.

Well there's everything at Project Gutenberg.

I found a better price.
sucker.

A couple of good places to get free ebooks are:

• Project Gutenberg
• Manybooks.net (which for some reason isn't working at the time of this writing!)

There are quite a few others, but many of these sites share 90% of the same content anyhow. I've got a Kindle and greatly enjoy it, but like many of the other readers here, I balk at the ridiculous prices for ebooks (wow, a dollar off the electronic edition!!). There's a great backlog of classics out there that are freely available, so I'm not really wanting for leisure reading content. I guess I'll just have to wait for Going Rogue to go public domain!

I know this is /. and I'm supposed to be outraged; but surely I'm not the only one who thinks of ownership as a burden. With Netflix streaming, I can (cheaply) obtain access to far more movies than I ever care to watch. If one becomes unavailable (Moon, I'm looking at you!) I'll just pick one of the thousands of other movies to watch.

Same thing with my kindle. There are more books on Project Gutenberg than I'll ever get through, not to mention cheap/free modern electronically published works, never mind conventional publishers. If I can't read one, I'll move to the next.

A movie collection (even ripped) has storage and maintenance costs (time, money, space, storage for the physical disks, etc.). A book collection even more so - shelving, enough home space to house said shelving, ways to protect the books from my kids. If it becomes valuable enough, you need the added expense of security (plus living where the crime rate is low enough for security to work). Take away enough of the crap "ownership" (it still isn't yours, really) and your life will still be just as enriched as before, but less of your time/capital (and use of time to generate capital) is wrapped up in "stuff". In fact, that sounds like a major component of "wealth".

Welcome to the Rentership Society! The only thing I miss from home ownership is my own plot of land for a garden. Okay, I also wish we had better soundproofing in our walls/floors, but that's due to our budget choices, not rentership in general...

You don't need to be anti e-reader. Just anti DRM. There's plenty of free material out there if you know where to look for it. I'm pretty sure there's others too.

Cheers!

A better solution....

It's not exactly a new problem. :)

And here's the link I forgot to add: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

With regards to 2 D universe in the early universe, "Flatland" was from 1884. Err... 1884 is "early universe" to this 5 digit UID, you lower digit UIDs probably think of 1884 as your middle age.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/97

Sounds nice!

I nominate you people to keep a copy of the Gutenberg DVD. Pity "A Canticle for Leibowitz" isn't out of copyright yet :-)

Have you heard of the experiments in "Transition Towns" to improve resilience of local communities? It might interest you.

Sure but:
1) Who really reads the commentary? The stupid pawns don't. The Dictator-to-be using the pawns might, but he doesn't care.
2) In most countries that are rich or that are growing rich, most of the workers already have votes and are voting in Capitalists.

Fact is you will have communists starting violent revolutions as part of the implementation as long as they follow the Communist Manifesto which states:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

And as long as violence is part of the revolution they will end up with a dictatorship.

Think about it. How else would the whole country realize who is the "winner" of the violent revolution? The winner is the one who has defeated all challengers. And in a violent revolution, the defeating is done violently not via votes or debates.

If you're very lucky you get a dictator who hands over the power soon after.

Only parts of it. I actually just downloaded it from Gutenberg.org

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/815 - Volume 1
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/815 - Volume 2

I've got a bunch of reading to do before them though. I'm cuurently reading "Blink" by Gladwell, and have two others of his books next.

Only parts of it. I actually just downloaded it from Gutenberg.org

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/815 - Volume 1
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/815 - Volume 2

I've got a bunch of reading to do before them though. I'm cuurently reading "Blink" by Gladwell, and have two others of his books next.

"Roog" is one of the best stories, ever. I'm also fond of "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford".

And last night I read "The Eyes Have It", which I don't think I'd encountered before.

But even if you did believe that they worked in fundamentally the same way, THIS article from just the other day claims that the best estimate so far is that all the computing power in the world today, including Watson, Deep Blue, all the Crays, desktops, and all the way down to cell phones, added together... is equivalent to approximately the computing and storage power of a single human brain.

The fine article claims that "Our total storage capacity is the same as an adult human's DNA". Yet human DNA has been sequenced and is available for download (link to chromosome 1, increase the number (3502, 3503 etc) to get the rest), totalling a few gigabytes as uncompressed text files. So I find the articles other claims somewhat dubious.

'Relatively' invisible may not be good enough. In this book the main character was invisible except for his retinas. H. G. Wells had thought it out, if light didn't interact at all with his eyes he would be blind.

There was a moment when he was discovered because someone noticed those two tiny spots moving around.

This looks like The Fourth "R" by George O. Smith.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18602

I find most distrubing that in, a grown up person, a word can distract from the meaning.

It distracts from the story, because the reader sees "nigger" and it triggers a response that the author did not intend.

...

There's nothing wrong with that lesson being taught. But its a problem if that's not the lesson you set out to teach.

My opinion? That's bullshit by the tonne and I do hope you were trying to play the devil's advocate. I will assume that is your intention and ask you to consider the below as an imaginary dialog with "the devil".

1. Here's the lesson you should set out to teach. In which the contrast between the derogatory use of nigger and the acts depicted in the story has everything to do with the story.
Granted, if you want to teach another lesson, Huck Finn may not serve your purpose... but if you want to teach another lesson, why choose to butcher "Huck Finn" instead of finding something else?

2. As for your attempt to reference the intentions/motives of the author... by the very words of the author in the opening of the book, you should be prosecuted, banished or shot.

I also strongly urge you to go back to your coloring book and make sure you don't color outside the lines (of course, I'm using a metaphor here) - it is your right if you chose so.
But please stop imposing your forced "politically correct" approximation of what the art of painting should be to other people that like paiting or, worse, cripple the kids that may like painting in the future (would they be exposed to what really painting means).

I find most distrubing that in, a grown up person, a word can distract from the meaning.

It distracts from the story, because the reader sees "nigger" and it triggers a response that the author did not intend.

...

There's nothing wrong with that lesson being taught. But its a problem if that's not the lesson you set out to teach.

My opinion? That's bullshit by the tonne and I do hope you were trying to play the devil's advocate. I will assume that is your intention and ask you to consider the below as an imaginary dialog with "the devil".

1. Here's the lesson you should set out to teach. In which the contrast between the derogatory use of nigger and the acts depicted in the story has everything to do with the story.
Granted, if you want to teach another lesson, Huck Finn may not serve your purpose... but if you want to teach another lesson, why choose to butcher "Huck Finn" instead of finding something else?

2. As for your attempt to reference the intentions/motives of the author... by the very words of the author in the opening of the book, you should be prosecuted, banished or shot.

I also strongly urge you to go back to your coloring book and make sure you don't color outside the lines (of course, I'm using a metaphor here) - it is your right if you chose so.
But please stop imposing your forced "politically correct" approximation of what the art of painting should be to other people that like paiting or, worse, cripple the kids that may like painting in the future (would they be exposed to what really painting means).

Links:

Text

Wikipedia article

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/
which has links for several others, including:

http://www.manybooks.net/
http://www.feedbooks.com/
http://www.booksinmyphone.com/

A modest proposal

Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

Ivan to Alyosha, in Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. (Or, if that's too long, The Grand Inquisitor stands on its own as a masterpiece!)

And, just as a bonus parting thought because it's one of my favorite quotes and tenuously related, maybe we'd all be better off if we shared some of the 'coexistence of faith and unbelief' of Dostoevsky. It doesn't bother me if people turn to a God in search of answers, but when they're confident enough to build a theme park out of it, it makes me nauseous. To quote Dostoevsky once more in Notes from the Dead House,

Not because you are religious, but because I myself have experienced and felt it keenly, I will tell you that in such moments one thirsts like “parched grass” for faith and finds it precisely because truth shines in misfortune. I will tell you regarding myself that I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt up till now and even (I know it) until my coffin closes. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and still costs me, becoming stronger in my soul, the more there is in me of contrary reasonings. And yet sometimes God sends me moments in which I am utterly at peace.

Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

Ivan to Alyosha, in Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. (Or, if that's too long, The Grand Inquisitor stands on its own as a masterpiece!)

And, just as a bonus parting thought because it's one of my favorite quotes and tenuously related, maybe we'd all be better off if we shared some of the 'coexistence of faith and unbelief' of Dostoevsky. It doesn't bother me if people turn to a God in search of answers, but when they're confident enough to build a theme park out of it, it makes me nauseous. To quote Dostoevsky once more in Notes from the Dead House,

Not because you are religious, but because I myself have experienced and felt it keenly, I will tell you that in such moments one thirsts like “parched grass” for faith and finds it precisely because truth shines in misfortune. I will tell you regarding myself that I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt up till now and even (I know it) until my coffin closes. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and still costs me, becoming stronger in my soul, the more there is in me of contrary reasonings. And yet sometimes God sends me moments in which I am utterly at peace.

Who was it that recently charted significant deadtree-sales spikes directly related to ebook piracy?

As to the nominal topic, being a rabid Jack Vance fan I immediately had to sally forth and find the cited work, which lies here (and which I had never before seen in print):

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30002

It is appended with this notice:

"This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note."

I'm more inclined to trust PG's lawyers than Greg Bear's outrage.

I THINK that U.S. copyright can be renewed after it has expired, but I'm not sure.

I thought that was the reason you can get "Animal Farm" and "1984" at Australia's http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell
but not at http://www.gutenberg.org/

In a market with no regulations, you can't enforce a contract.

What makes the muscle I pay to enforce my contracts with taxes inherently better than independently contracted muscle?

In a truly free market your grocer can sell you poison and not tell you.

He can do that now too. Occasionally does, by accident. (OK, perhaps salmonella in peanut butter and mad cow disease aren't poison per se. Close enough.) Incredibly bad for business, I might add.

The real free market, the one the people who coined the phrase intended, is a specific set of constraints to produce a fair marketplace. It is tightly regulated to ensure it works as desired, it is by no means a free for all.

I will admit to not having actually read Adam Smith as such. I feel virtually certain he has a quote I can use to answer this, but 5 minutes with The Wealth of Nations and firefox search was not enough to uncover it. Those economists in the Austrian school, at least, would however disagree vehemently.

The whole point of an Invisible Hand is that maintenance of order will arise spontaneously from chaos, because order benefits everyone. All the externally imposed order of government does is force men into a pattern that is slightly unnatural.

It seems to be the authors heirs that have the problem with this, not the authors. I think you are right, I'm sure these authors would enjoy having their 50 some odd year old orphaned works read again.

I see four works on which my mother holds the copyright. I've been trying for some time to convince her to make electronic versions of my father's work (there's quite a bit more) and give it away while asking for donations. Perhaps when I point this out to her she'll reconsider.

Start with The Wealth of Nations. Keep in mind while reading that he was writing about a very different world. Consider his examples and how they are changed in a world where corporations far more common (in his day it was possible for an individual to never do business with a corporation without even trying).

Then search on Adam Smith market regulation. Have a pound of salt handy, you'll find everything from insightful analysis to the worst sort of economic fundamentalism.

IMHO, we need to replace the web of small regulations with a few big ones. Do away with corporate personhood entirely and enforce corporate charter being contingent upon the public interest. Then we should probably enshrine in law that being "too big to fail" is intrinsically against the public interest.

if God hadn't wanted us to eventually select it for ourselves, there would have been no apple

That's addressed in Paradise Lost. The gist of the idea is that God wanted us to love and obey Him because we wanted to, not because He made us that way - thus, we had to have free will, including the will to disobey.

The traveller who has never before experienced an arctic summer, and who has been accustomed to think of Siberia as a land of eternal snow and ice, cannot help being astonished at the sudden and wonderful development of animal and vegetable life throughout that country in the month of June, and the rapidity of the transition from winter to summer in the course of a few short weeks. In the early part of June it is frequently possible to travel in 'the vicinity of Gizhiga upon dog-sledges, while by the last of the same month the trees are all in full leaf, primroses, cowslips, buttercups, valerian, cinquefoil, and labrador tea, blossom everywhere upon the higher plains and river banks, and the thermometer at noon frequently reaches 70 deg. Fahr. in the shade. There is no spring, in the usual acceptation of the word, at all. The disappearance of snow and the appearance of vegetation are almost simultaneous; and although the tundras or moss steppes, continue for some time to hold water like a saturated sponge, they are covered with flowers and blossoming blueberry bushes, and show no traces of the long, cold winter which has so recently ended.

George Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia

I avoid eBook piracy by simply by reading the classics

You may well already know about it, but Project Gutenberg is an excellent 'one stop shop' for out of copyright literature. Combine that with online library access and it becomes pretty easy to keep an eBook reader (legally) filled without paying to do so.

That said, I quite agree with you that current eBook pricing is too high, and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the market.

I suppose now is a good time as any to mention Project Gutenber.

Bad example. Copyright on Tolstoy expired long ago.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

Book 2600, even....

Ah, so that's why a new translation was released the other year - the original work is out of copyright, but of course the latest translation isn't!

Various publishers can print War and Peace and sell it, but only one can sell the shiny new version (probably accounts for the various prices mentioned below, as well)

Bad example. Copyright on Tolstoy expired long ago.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

Book 2600, even....

Like the title says, thought I'd check out the parent's book recommendation: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8993

Am I missing something here?

The fact that the intrinsic worth of content has gone down to almost zero.

Sure, you can argue about how hard people have to work to produce content, etc, etc. But sooner or later the whole world is going to have to wake up to the fact that the complete works of William Shakespeare take up less than 2MB, and this is only going to get worse. Sooner or later, a complete list of all Paramount pictures will fit in a single portable hard drive and will be transmittable over a home internet connection in less than a day. It doesn't matter what legal, ethical, commerical or social system you put in place against this. Eventually, your system will buckle under the sheer weight of what the new digital reality has done to the distribution of content.

This isn't an argument for or against piracy or bloggers freeloading off news. It's an argument for why content such as news is increasingly becoming something people don't see it worth paying for. And I understand the paradox here: it now costs more to make content--even something as cheap as news--than it does to distribute it to the entire world.

Advertising can pay for the distribution no problem, but there is probably no existing commercial model left which can pay for the content. If you can't profit on something that you're distributing to the entire world, the game is up.

Society has spoken; it's not willing to pay for commercial news, either directly or through advertising. We could switch to a subsidized or public service model of news, or have no news at all. But commercial news services are about to become increasingly scant (not that they weren't becoming so anyway). People are not going to pay for a newspaper that has less data than one of their friends facebook pictures. People might not like to hear this, but this is where the almost zero cost of data has taken us.

I believe you were probably thinking of his omniscience, being all powerful doesn't really take away the possibility of free will, where being all knowing might. James Talmage, in Jesus the Christ, I believe had a very good explanation of the omniscience of God:

Respecting the foreknowledge of God, let it not be said that divine omniscience is of itself a determining cause whereby events are inevitably brought to pass. A mortal father, who knows the weaknesses and frailties of his son, may by reason of that knowledge sorrowfully predict the calamities and sufferings awaiting his wayward boy. He may foresee in that son's future a forfeiture of blessings that could have been won, loss of position, self-respect, reputation and honor; even the dark shadows of a felon's cell and the night of a drunkard's grave may appear in the saddening visions of that fond father's soul; yet, convinced by experience of the impossibility of bringing about that son's reform, he foresees the dread developments of the future, and he finds but sorrow and anguish in his knowledge. Can it be said that the father's foreknowledge is a cause of the son's sinful life?

I once heard an explanation that makes sense. It's like seeing millions of paths, as time goes by some paths fade away and new ones unfold.