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Any of these will change the way you look at the world:

• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry
• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, by Henry Petroski
• The Evolution of Useful Things

Any of these will change the way you look at the world:

• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry
• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, by Henry Petroski
• The Evolution of Useful Things

Any of these will change the way you look at the world:

• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry
• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, by Henry Petroski
• The Evolution of Useful Things

I wasn't logged in and thus inadvertantly read this Katz article, which I always keep turned off in my preferences. I'm not that interested in the trials and tribulations of Amazon employees and all the terrible things they must go through to afford their $400,000 houses. One thing I will say, however, is that although amazon.com may be a virtual mega-mall-evil-conglomerate, it is one of the best designed web sites I have ever come across and they know how to treat their customers. I used to hate them until I actually gave them a try. I still prefer to support smaller businesses such as Powell's Books, but one could certainly do worse than to emulate the quality you can get from Amazon.

There's plenty of proof that used books help the publishing industry. The idea that there should be no aftermarket for books is far more ludicrious.

In truth, the ones that are most hurt by used books are authors who either have a niche market or are so small-potatoes they only get one press run. But how much they get hurt is open to discussion; if people find a used book and find they like it, they're far more likely to buy the next one by that author new. If they don't, they recycle the book back into the used market. An author can build a pretty good following through the used market, sometimes enough to get larger print runs of new books and reprints of older books.

What the publishing industry is doing harkens back to the Garth Brooks' boycott of used record stores. To try to curtain the aftermarket on anything is just plain silly. If this logic were to pervade, one's choices would be to either hang onto a book or bin it, and throwing out all those trees is very ecologically unsound. Imagine 10 or 11 Fresh Kills full of the contents of Powell's.

If these publishers were smart, they'd come up with a simple and easy to work with system that would allow for one person to buy personal-use rights to a book and compensate both the publisher and the author, then allow for that person to transfer those rights to another person temporarily or permanently. Or, maybe they can have a group of people pool their money and buy these same rights, then house these books in a centrally located public building with a method of allowing these people who have paid to borrow these books once or multiple times. I think these are great ideas, and I'm sure the publishers will get right on it....

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/electricCircuits/

Here is a partial list of books published online, that I happened to like enough to bookmark. I find that reading a book on the computer screen is tedious, I mostly use the online version as a reference.

Handbook of applied cryptography: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

Underground: (I actually haven't read this yet) http://www.underground-book.com/

Netizens: (only partly read this) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/

http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/crypto/army.fi eld.manual/

Big Breach: http://www.antioffline.com/bigbreach/

The Prof's Book: http://frode.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/Turing/inde x.html

I have a lot of other links also, but my bookmarks have become so nested and folderized that many are lost in there, I really need bookmarks for my bookmarks . . . Anyway, I would suggest that if you find yourself looking for interesting reading online, you will find plenty. If you choose you can find scanned in pdf's of various works on newsgroups and in freenet, etc.

However, my advice is to use the 'net primarily as a way to figure out what to read, and become familar with the local public library. Almost all libraries have inter-library loans which give you access to huge amount of stuff. When I can't get a work that way, I fall back upon checking databases of used bookstore inventories -- http://abe.com/ and http://powellsbooks.com/ are the places I generally go to.