A quick scan through the popular torrent sites will enable you to download up to 50,000 books in a dozen or so torrents. Even allowing for the quick scan through to delete the rubbish - that is still a decent sized library.
SCRIBD/Baen/Gutenberg et al prove there is a market for ebooks. My own uploads to SCRIBD have had more tha 80,000 views in the last few weeks and they are nothing special...
All these - 'smell and feel of a book' people are just Luddites. I love my dead tree library too - but its not portable. My Hanlin book reader holds several thousand books on a 2gb SD card - it is DRM free, lightweight, comfortable to read anywhere - including in direct sunlight, reads a multitude of formats and has adjustable font sizes. It turns 9,000 pages before a charge is needed and can be left on indefinitely - it uses no power to leave the display on for weeks as the screen is e-ink/paper. It runs on Wolf Linux and is the only practical way for someone like me who like reading (but is always traveling) to get a print fix...
E-books are the future - like it or not - and sooner the better - especially for the text book industry which is well overdue for euthanasia...
You are right. I just Googled and read the constitution - and all it told me was how many ways GWB has been a crim...
However, I still think file-sharing would have been approved by the founding fathers if only for its Christian virtue of sharing what you have with others less fortunate....
There are more problems than normal accessing sites after the quake (from Beijing), but this may be infra-structure damage similar to that experienced last year after the Taiwan quake. I'm having trouble getting Youtube and Hotmail, but the vast majority of my usual feeds are up and running - speeds are a little slower than usual.
Never thought I'd have to tell slashdotters they were a bunch of Luddites. "Don't use your new-fangled cellphone tech to disturb my fragile in-flight equilibrium.." PUHLEEZE! Y'all sound like my grandma - and I'm in my fifties... Get yourselves a pair of cheap earplugs and ride the wave.... Jeez...
No one elected some anthropologist and gave him/her the Godlike power to decide which aspects of Aboriginal culture are rigidly enforced. Culture is a dynamic process. It should not be fossilized with rigidly enforced rules about what is and is not permissible.
Are Aboriginals not to be allowed to dissent? To be non-conformist? This kind of DRM/censorship should be thrown on the scrapheap with all the rest. It disenfranchises the ordinary people and puts their welfare into the hands of some supposedly benign protector. Total bullshit! Of course the Aboriginal elders support this - they are conservatives and resist change - what about the rising new generation? I worked with Aboriginal people in the 90's in central Australia - its about time this kind of paternalist crap was consigned to the trash...
The gauntlet has been thrown - the challenge accepted. I WILL get 12 Rolexes on the said appendage. Stay tuned - This may take some time as i have to synchronize watches...
Some are insightful... And some are total dicks when it comes to gut reactions to ideas ending in 'ism'. Suggestion: Take deep breath... say 'OM '. Re-evaluate your crappy world-view... become a better person. PROFIT!
Maybe its just me... But I'm NEVER going to buy audio that auto-delivers advertising. I might accept it as a gift - otherwise, what's in it for me? If this watermarking process in anyway degrades the listening experience... well, P2P awaits with quality products, and an unbeatable price...
I live in China. 5-7 bucks per hour here is more than any ordinary lawyer or a surgeon in a hospital would get. Most of the critics don't realize that $100 per month here is decent cash - enough to support an ordinary family - there are still millions of farmers living on less than $400 per year - and they are not dirt poor, they mostly have decent housing, phones, tvs and even net access in many places. Anyone earning 10,000 dollars per year or more is in the penthouse set. Those workers have good jobs and live in good conditions. They would probably count a minimum wage job in the US as a big comedown
USE A SPELL CHECKER! Useless bloody grade 4 English submissions by dyslexic retards... grumble grumble - least you can do when you know you have the writing talents of Shakespeare's dog is GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF...
OK/I feel better now//have a nice day
China is the place for mobile phones. Thousands of different models to choose from - every feature under the sun and no contracts. You buy the phone ($30 to several hundred dollars depending on what you want) pay about $16 US for a simcard and a month of credit - and you top it up every month with another $8-$10 US - usually plenty. No wonder half of all the mobiles in the world are here - everyone over 8 years old seems to have one. Cameras, net browsers, MP3 players, PDA's, translators, etc are everywhere.
Same system applies to dial up web access, no ISP's, just dial your local number, a small fee will be charged to it as you browse...
Strong sexuality? Neal Stephenson? Well, it's a great story - but the Bible has sexier passages than Neil... What's happening here? did you get an unexpurgated version the rest of the world was unaware of?
Can I get a copy....
My (dead tree) book library weighs well over 1,000 kg - more than 1 metric tonne. I have paid to transport it across and between 3 continents for 30 years - and yet I still rarely have it where I want it when I want it - and it's always a little more damaged when I get it.
This has frustrated me for years because I travel a lot and read a lot. Now, I have an old IBM ThinkPad that does the job perfectly. It's a dedicated portable library. I have installed MS reader plus ABC lit converter, + Adobe Professional and Openoffice. I can make any e book/text comfortable to read in about 5-10 minutes editing time. If you convert any doc to c5 size pdf - you have a reasonable paperback experience. MS Reader has brilliant type and a real book-sized viewing area with adjustable font size.
While I agree that reading on CRT is useless, a decent LCD is no problem. My ThinkPad is about the size and weight of a many hardbacks. Type size, and back lighting are adjustable, and it rests on a small pillow for reading in bed, on the sofa or in a hammock. It currently holds around 20,000 books plus a decent reference library of several hundred volumes.
I have read on this device daily for several years and now actually prefer it to the experience of reading many of the older original volumes I own, especially those with brittle yellow pages and fixed type sizes. Forget about the negativity of those who will tell you its not the same unless you can hold it and smell it and feel the texture of the cover. If you are a REAL reader and interested in books for their actual content - ebooks are fine.
I promise you, those who take the plunge will never look back. The ebook is the future. Having said that however, there is still absolutely no way I would buy a dedicated reader locked into any particular format. Also, I will not have a DRM'd book on my hard drive and never register my copies of MS reader - if it doesn't work, or comes up with a copyright 'please jump through these hoops' request - it's recycle bin time!
Slashdot Mirror
A quick scan through the popular torrent sites will enable you to download up to 50,000 books in a dozen or so torrents. Even allowing for the quick scan through to delete the rubbish - that is still a decent sized library. SCRIBD/Baen/Gutenberg et al prove there is a market for ebooks. My own uploads to SCRIBD have had more tha 80,000 views in the last few weeks and they are nothing special... All these - 'smell and feel of a book' people are just Luddites. I love my dead tree library too - but its not portable. My Hanlin book reader holds several thousand books on a 2gb SD card - it is DRM free, lightweight, comfortable to read anywhere - including in direct sunlight, reads a multitude of formats and has adjustable font sizes. It turns 9,000 pages before a charge is needed and can be left on indefinitely - it uses no power to leave the display on for weeks as the screen is e-ink/paper. It runs on Wolf Linux and is the only practical way for someone like me who like reading (but is always traveling) to get a print fix... E-books are the future - like it or not - and sooner the better - especially for the text book industry which is well overdue for euthanasia...
You are right. I just Googled and read the constitution - and all it told me was how many ways GWB has been a crim... However, I still think file-sharing would have been approved by the founding fathers if only for its Christian virtue of sharing what you have with others less fortunate....
There are more problems than normal accessing sites after the quake (from Beijing), but this may be infra-structure damage similar to that experienced last year after the Taiwan quake. I'm having trouble getting Youtube and Hotmail, but the vast majority of my usual feeds are up and running - speeds are a little slower than usual.
Never thought I'd have to tell slashdotters they were a bunch of Luddites. "Don't use your new-fangled cellphone tech to disturb my fragile in-flight equilibrium.." PUHLEEZE! Y'all sound like my grandma - and I'm in my fifties... Get yourselves a pair of cheap earplugs and ride the wave.... Jeez...
Pirate Bay is not blocked in China.
No one elected some anthropologist and gave him/her the Godlike power to decide which aspects of Aboriginal culture are rigidly enforced. Culture is a dynamic process. It should not be fossilized with rigidly enforced rules about what is and is not permissible. Are Aboriginals not to be allowed to dissent? To be non-conformist? This kind of DRM/censorship should be thrown on the scrapheap with all the rest. It disenfranchises the ordinary people and puts their welfare into the hands of some supposedly benign protector. Total bullshit! Of course the Aboriginal elders support this - they are conservatives and resist change - what about the rising new generation? I worked with Aboriginal people in the 90's in central Australia - its about time this kind of paternalist crap was consigned to the trash...
The gauntlet has been thrown - the challenge accepted. I WILL get 12 Rolexes on the said appendage. Stay tuned - This may take some time as i have to synchronize watches...
Some are insightful... And some are total dicks when it comes to gut reactions to ideas ending in 'ism'. Suggestion: Take deep breath... say 'OM '. Re-evaluate your crappy world-view... become a better person. PROFIT!
Maybe its just me... But I'm NEVER going to buy audio that auto-delivers advertising. I might accept it as a gift - otherwise, what's in it for me? If this watermarking process in anyway degrades the listening experience... well, P2P awaits with quality products, and an unbeatable price...
I live in China. 5-7 bucks per hour here is more than any ordinary lawyer or a surgeon in a hospital would get. Most of the critics don't realize that $100 per month here is decent cash - enough to support an ordinary family - there are still millions of farmers living on less than $400 per year - and they are not dirt poor, they mostly have decent housing, phones, tvs and even net access in many places. Anyone earning 10,000 dollars per year or more is in the penthouse set. Those workers have good jobs and live in good conditions. They would probably count a minimum wage job in the US as a big comedown
USE A SPELL CHECKER! Useless bloody grade 4 English submissions by dyslexic retards... grumble grumble - least you can do when you know you have the writing talents of Shakespeare's dog is GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF... OK /I feel better now //have a nice day
China is the place for mobile phones. Thousands of different models to choose from - every feature under the sun and no contracts. You buy the phone ($30 to several hundred dollars depending on what you want) pay about $16 US for a simcard and a month of credit - and you top it up every month with another $8-$10 US - usually plenty. No wonder half of all the mobiles in the world are here - everyone over 8 years old seems to have one. Cameras, net browsers, MP3 players, PDA's, translators, etc are everywhere. Same system applies to dial up web access, no ISP's, just dial your local number, a small fee will be charged to it as you browse...
Strong sexuality? Neal Stephenson? Well, it's a great story - but the Bible has sexier passages than Neil... What's happening here? did you get an unexpurgated version the rest of the world was unaware of? Can I get a copy....
My (dead tree) book library weighs well over 1,000 kg - more than 1 metric tonne. I have paid to transport it across and between 3 continents for 30 years - and yet I still rarely have it where I want it when I want it - and it's always a little more damaged when I get it. This has frustrated me for years because I travel a lot and read a lot. Now, I have an old IBM ThinkPad that does the job perfectly. It's a dedicated portable library. I have installed MS reader plus ABC lit converter, + Adobe Professional and Openoffice. I can make any e book/text comfortable to read in about 5-10 minutes editing time. If you convert any doc to c5 size pdf - you have a reasonable paperback experience. MS Reader has brilliant type and a real book-sized viewing area with adjustable font size. While I agree that reading on CRT is useless, a decent LCD is no problem. My ThinkPad is about the size and weight of a many hardbacks. Type size, and back lighting are adjustable, and it rests on a small pillow for reading in bed, on the sofa or in a hammock. It currently holds around 20,000 books plus a decent reference library of several hundred volumes. I have read on this device daily for several years and now actually prefer it to the experience of reading many of the older original volumes I own, especially those with brittle yellow pages and fixed type sizes. Forget about the negativity of those who will tell you its not the same unless you can hold it and smell it and feel the texture of the cover. If you are a REAL reader and interested in books for their actual content - ebooks are fine. I promise you, those who take the plunge will never look back. The ebook is the future. Having said that however, there is still absolutely no way I would buy a dedicated reader locked into any particular format. Also, I will not have a DRM'd book on my hard drive and never register my copies of MS reader - if it doesn't work, or comes up with a copyright 'please jump through these hoops' request - it's recycle bin time!