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Doctorow: Ebooks Neither E Nor Books
xanderwilson writes "Author Cory Doctorow has released his paper/speech for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this year into the public domain. A very interesting read about his experience with Magic Kingdom (which he is soon re-releasing under a more lenient Creative Commons license), the failure of e-books, and filesharing as a tool for creators."
For an expert on e-publishing, you'd think he'd be able to format the text correctly.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
blame it on Micro$oft
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first post!!! you lame assholes... I can post first because my XBox is a american product and my pride in my great country and my great XBox accelerate everything...
If only they would make games for that bitch... IAve played Metroid Prime and it ruled... I hope M$ will buy those japanese bastards and port Metroid to my great american console system!!!
Join the fun!!!
Was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.
discuss.
Maybe you need a browser that handles text files better, my friend...because Safari wraps it just fine. Hardly "insightful" of you to point out a bug in your own browser; after all, it would word-wrap a big long string of HTML, now wouldn't it?
On a side-note, it's better than those websites which insist on using a quarter of your screen because the designer's too stupid to make a layout that works at any screen width....
drop my Zaurus or laptop and I'll cry, drop my book and I'll just pick it back up
No kiddin', really? If I drop a $20 calculator, I'm not going to be upset much either...but if I drop my HP48GX(hasn't been made in years, cost a couple hundred $), I'm gonna be pissed. Similarly, if I had a rare book that was leather-bound, gilded, etc...and then went and spilled something on it...it'd be even worse.
Please help metamoderate.
This is a great article for anyone interested in electronic texts and/or Creative Commons. Some departments are looking into ebook deals at the college where I work, and it's depressing to contemplate what the publishers are going to do to these wide-eyed academics who are being convinced to bypass the college library and buy ebooks directly. Every day I see scores of students borrowing older editions of books (we only keep them if they're still of use). I can't see that practice lasting long in the ebook world. I hear about deals that offer, say, ten electronic 'copies' that can be viewed at any one time. This is, of course, identical to buying ten paperback copies - the annoyance is that it does absolutely nothing to harness the strengths of the ebook. In fact, if you end up with an ebook with limited or crippled printing / copying permissions, and they certainly exist, you've got something far less useful to everyone except the publisher.
/. is home to enough sad tales of print-based academic text gouging, too.)
Like Doctorow, I'm not against ebooks - they can be marvellous when they fully explot their format. But it's depressing to hear about that format being abused in the name of sheer profit, especially in the realm of education. (Though
People have been doing some interesting things with Doctorow's recently released Creative Commons title, Eastern Standard Tribe, and he has plenty of anecdotes about how releasing the book for 'free' (with Some Rights Reserved) has helped sales of the print copy. He's promoting the ebook environment I'd love to see flourishing five years down the line. The (well, one, but a likely one) alternative is books with DRM, which is the saddest kind of book I can imagine.
What a surprise to see my trolling on Amazon show up in Cory's speech. (I am "a reader from Redwood City, CA.")
:-)
Poor Cory. His problem isn't that he isn't talented. It's that he doesn't understand what he's talented *at*.
His writing is exactly what I said: amateurish, stiff, uninspired. What he's good at: talking about the future in speeches and essays. I've seen him speak in public, and I think he's a great communicator and persuader. He just isn't an artist.
He's right about this, though: bad press is good press, if it makes someone go check out his online book to see how bad it is. (You could always do that in a bookstore, but he still has something of a point.) Some people will actually like what they read. I don't mind that; my opinion doesn't have to be everyone's.
It's just that when major publications start talking about what great art his books are, *someone* needs to yell out that the emperor is naked, and I decided I had to be that guy.
Nothing personal at all, Cory. We're mainly on the same side, in truth. And sorry for mis-spelling your name.
Has anyone tried the books in itunes? I was never a big fan of e-books on the PC or the Ipaq/handheld but I always liked Audio books. There was a time when one of my family members lost their sight for half a year and we had a bunch, so I gave them a try and really liked them.
Has anyone tried them yet and what's your experience?