Richard Hatch is still trying, and still has hope. He has a brief trailer that he's made on credit cards and lunch money, and he shows it at conventions--he showed it at VisionCon here in Springfield, Missouri earlier this month, and also the previous year when he and Jack Stauffer were both con guests.
I don't know about what happened in Luxembourg--I wish I'd heard about this pre-con, so I could have asked him about it--but the rights thing over Galactica is such a huge mess that, if it was more than a couple years ago, I'm not surprised, and I really wouldn't blame Richard for it. Apparently Glen Larsen discovering that he had some residual rights to some elements of (but not all of) the show via the episodes he wrote knocked the whole thing into a cocked hat, and nobody knew exactly who had what rights anymore. Hatch has been trying the best he can to get the whole thing ironed out, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this new wrinkle. One thing's for sure--Hatch's fans can swing a lot of letter-writing power. Call it a "snail-mail Slashdot effect." The Sci-Fi channel abruptly dropped their plans for a Galactica update last month--though I'll admit it might have been due partly to Singer's sudden interest in the franchise.
As far as creative vision is concerned, Hatch is clearly no duffer. He's actually written--and I don't mean Shatnerly-ghost-written, I mean written--a trilogy taking Galactica into the future, and the storyline of that trilogy is roughly the way the new show would go.
The trailer is really slick, with some great footage (albeit perhaps a bit of overacting), a special appearance by Lorne Greene, and CGI done by volunteers that looks incredibly polished. There's one shot of a Viper zooming through an open tunnel in one side of a starship and out the other that never failed to elicit gasps of awe from the audience. It's amazing how slick and polished it looks--you'd swear it was from a finished product. Hatch tells stories of screening it to studio execs who were sort of embarrassed going in, expecting to see someone's home video, and then had to pick their jaws up off the floor when it showed.
There are some still frames from the trailer on the BattlestarGalactica.com website, but due to SAG rules (having to do with the actors actually having to be paid and stuff), they can't put the whole thing online or otherwise make it available. So they screen it at cons.
Hatch has always expressed a willingness to work with whoever got the rights--even Larsen, though Larson rebuffed him (and Larsen's involvement with the Singer version doesn't give me a whole lot of hope). Hatch can also swing most of the still-alive original cast--even the reclusive Dirk Benedict. All he wants is to ensure that the new series has the same things that kept people watching the old series--the original cast in their original roles. All the other proposed BSG projects have been planned to focus elsewhere--on other elements in the BSG universe. Hatch can understand that the studios might prefer to swap in new faces, but all he wants is that there should be a segueway from the old to the new, with more than lip service paid to the original. One of his great fears (and mine, too) is that they'll do a recast and remake, a la the Lost in Space movie that Bill Mumy lobbied for and was then shut out of.
The problem with Hatch, as I imagine the "suits" in charge of studios see it, is that he's a starry-eyed dreamer, with a Vision. That so overshadows the other aspect of him--his business sense, and ability to make much out of limited resources--that it's no wonder the suits get scared. After all, other dreamers with creative vision in the past have made major holes in studio pocketbooks--just look at Kevin Costner.
Still, the open letters and interviews posted to the BSG site lately do give me hope, especially the fandom.com interview with DeSanto in which he says he respects and admires Hatch for keeping the fandom alive and would like to see his trailer. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
(Another trailer Hatch showed at the con was his new project, The Great War of Magellan. This one is also an unfinished teaser, but the storyline looks promising and it has quite a few interesting faces in it--Hatch, Jason Carter, Brad Dourif . . . have to wait and see what develops there, too.) --
The nice people at Sigma Designs sent me a Netstream 2000 card for me to beta-test, and I have to report that it does pretty well at playing DVDs under Linux. The only caveats are that I can't get the X diaplay client that comes with it to work, so I can only pipe them out to my TV set, and since my TV set is a TVCR I have to put up with macrovision on most movies (special kudos to MGM for foregoing Macrovision on its titles--I can watch the James Bond spec.eds. or This Is Spinal Tap while I'm in Unix, even if I can't do the same for The Matrix).
Of course, since the NS2K costs a couple hundred dollars, it's not exactly an optimal solution for most people . .. --
Yes, and Napigator works, too. The only thing is, when Napster's official servers close down, the OpenNap servers may experience their own "Napster flood" effect. I've already been unable to connect to some of the more popular opennap servers from time to time because of user limits. --
That's not the way I remember it. I'd always been told that America nationalized the Aspirin trademark during World War II, since it was held by a German company and this was a way to get back at them. --
Actually, Bluelight is still in that business, at least so far--however, they've cut back to a limit of 25 hours per month, and seem to be trying frantically to redefine themselves as the e-tailing heir to K-mart's prior incarnation of kiosk shopping, K-mart Solutions. The K-mart store where I work part-time as a cashier has these "Bluelight.com is now limited to 25 hours per month" signs plastered all over the place.
Of course, this was really only to be expected from K-mart, which tries to have "family friendly" as its middle name. Note that K-mart also promised to start carding for mature-rated computer games last October. (I don't know whether it actually does or not, as I haven't had any mature-rated video games come through my line since then. K-mart seems to card for just about everything else, though--alcohol, cigarettes, lighters, lighter fluid, non-tobacco imitation cigarettes and snuff--that's right, you have to be over 18 to buy shredded mint leaves!--knives, tire irons, even wheel ramps and cans of fix-a-flat--we can't have a little kiddie inflate someone to death, can we?--and so forth.) --
Nothing does--but for anything the library buys itself, new, it would tend to pay more. (Though I don't think the libraries absolutely have to buy everything new--my mother is a librarian for a small high school and she's done such things as buying several hundred dollars' worth of used books (to use up the library's credit at a store) at perfectly normal prices.)
One thing worth noting, though, from the courses in LibSci I've taken myself, is that any movies a library buys are more expensive, because they're sold without that "FBI warning" on the front that says you can't copy, display publically, loan, etc. etc. the movie--because along with that copy, they're buying the rights to do exactly that. --
I think you're right. (Though I believe tips are supposed to be 15%, not 5%. I usually accomplish this by dividing by 6 and rounding up to the nearest quarter. Sure, it's a bit extra, but I like to think it leaves the waitperson or deliveryperson a bit more kindly disposed toward me.)
I have to admit, one thing I noticed after I got a digital watch that displayed the day of the week was that I suddenly had a bit of trouble remembering what day of the week it was when I wasn't wearing a watch. Now when I leave my PDA behind, darn do I ever know it. And miss it. I keep my life in that little critter. When my parents' home 800 number changes, I no longer bother to memorize it. Likewise my schedule, or what room my classes are in. Boy am I in trouble when I forget it!:) --
You know, I can't help but worry that maybe a couple years down the road, after Microsoft's "dot-NET" thing has taken off, they might start suing anyone whose domain name ends in ".net" for trademark infringement . . .
No, that's "No Place Like Springfield"--though it was indeed the other episode I was thinking of, especially since I live in one of the many towns in the US that is also called Springfield (Missouri).
"Worlds Without End" is the one where a malfunctioning disentigrator ray tears a hole in spacetime to a universe where Cobra won, involving such happy fun things as the 'Joes happening upon skeletons in the desert wearing their dogtags, and Steeler getting bitten by an infectious bug and getting delirious and hallucinating, and declaring that they're all dead and they've gone to hell (though they can't use the word "hell" due to BS&P).
The original G.I. Joe cartoon, at its best, was a thinking man's show, or almost. It had some terrific episodes, such the two-parter "Worlds Without End," which was recently released on video, and may just make me break my "DVD only" dictum if it doesn't hit the shiny disc soon. I defy anyone to watch that show without shivering--it's a creepy SF/horror story that could have come right off the Twilight Zone. That episode should be pictured in the dictionary under the term "mindf*ck," it's just that good. --
And one little thing I forgot to mention--Hasbro bought Tonka a few years back--meaning they own all of Tonka's toys, including the Go-Bots line.
Which is how come when that water-squirting G2 came out, they could call him Go-Bots--and how they could call those later, Hot-Wheels compatible Transformers "Go-Bots" too. --
Neither Transformers nor Gobots were really a "ripoff". In both cases, what they were were American toy companies buying up overstocks of Japanese toys that hadn't sold very well, renaming them, changing the background around, and marketing them as something completely different in America. You can read all about the history of it in the Generation One section of the Transformers FAQ.
The odd thing is, the Transformers toys sold a lot better than the original Japanese toys on which they'd been based--revitalizing Japanese toy manufacturer Takara, who made most of the original Generation One toys, and still continues (in partnership with Hasbro) to make Transformers to this day. In fact, the Transformers cartoon became popular enough in Japan itself to spawn three new animé series (Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory), an OAV (Zone), and myriad manga, after the franchise's demise in America. In Japan and Europe, Transformers never really died out--a lot of the "Generation Two" and "Machine Wars" toys were American re-issues of European or Japanese product.
Why do so many people think fondly of Transformers? Well, the writing of the shows, though occasionally juvenile, still managed to be sufficiently mature that not just kids but teens and even some adults could enjoy it. It portrayed all the characters as being three-dimensional--even the villains, who could have friendships, motivations, and respect for their adversaries, and who never resorted to the kiddie-show characterization of referring to themselves as "evil". To this day, there is a strident faction of Decepticon devotees active in fandom, who insist that the Deceps were misunderstood and that their "survival of the fittest" philosophy was actually in Cybertron's best interests. The show had some silly episodes, and some that make even the most devoted fans cringe--but at its best, it could really make you stop and think. You just don't find that kind of depth in most other kids' shows of that day, and even less in such shows of today.
And that's just the TV show. There were comic books, too--80-some in the US (plus the 12-issue Generation 2 miniseries), 300-some in the UK--whose storyline was nearly entirely different from the show, and which featured some terrific writing--especially toward the end, during Simon Furman's run. These were a lot more mature than the TV show, with a more serious storyline and more room for characterization.
As for the later stuff--while not as good as the original, Beast Wars did have quite a few good points. It's too bad they fired the creative staff and went on to make that god-awful Beast Machines thing afterward.
As for GoBots . . . well, I'll agree with you that the toys were pretty cool (the ones I saw, at least). But the episode or two of the TV show that I caught didn't seem to live up to the sort of thing I saw in Transformers. It may just be a matter of personal preference, though.
Anyway, I've written a bit more about TF fandom in this article. Feel free to check it out. --
Well, you know, Transformers came out in the days before the Dawn of the Toy Collector--you know, back when everybody knew that toys were for playing with, not for saving against a college education. Back when toy companies hadn't thought to come out with Arctic Batman, Mountain-Climbing Batman, Nose-Picking Batman (with spring-loaded Booger-Flinging Action(TM)), and so on, to make toys that appealed more to collectors than to kids.
People played with their toys back then--so it became super-rare to find any of them in good condition. Scarcity drives price--and for a complete set, of course you'll pay more than you would for individual items, just for all the work it took the guy to assemble it.
Nowadays, everyone's collecting toys--and so, ironically, it will be decades before they're worth anything--if ever. Which means, I guess, that now toys really are just for playing with. --
A slightly edited version of the song is played during the Junkyon battle sequence (edited to fit the action, not for content or anything), and a bit later on after everyone's gotten together and ironed out all their differences. You can indeed hear the lyrics.
The confusion may stem from the rare TFTM music score CDs, issued for the BotCon convention (and occasionally findable on eBay or Napster--search on the word "botcon"), featuring rerecordings of all the instrumental music from Transformers: The Movie.
For the CD, Vince DiCola modified the instrumental piece from that part of the movie slightly, dropping in an instrumental version of the "Dare to Be Stupid" synthesizer riff to substitute for the music played at that point in the movie, which of course could not be included on that CD. --
The odd thing is, the gun-Megatron is only being reissued in Japan. Apparently, due to restrictive toy gun laws over here, he can't be sold in the USA anymore.
(As long as this story about Transformers is up, I should probably plug the rec.toys.transformers.moderated newsgroup which I help to moderate, as well as the article about Transformers fandom that I wrote a while back. And the yearly Transformers convention, BotCon, which will be in Carolina this year.) --
The article also mentions Themestream, a site which has earned me a good bit of money (and enabled me to make a couple hundred buck donation to help keep Nausicaa.net going). Too bad it's now only paying two cents per hit... --
Here is a great page of zero-tolerance horror stories, courtesy of Randy Cassingham, editor of the This Is True email newsletter. Randy doesn't like Zero Tolerance much, either. (I passed on the links to the stories about the Canadian boy to him.) --
It's no different than Id releasing the first level of Doom for free, introduce people to
your product. Baen has already been releasing the first 50 to 100 pages of their books
on the net for a long time. This just takes it a bit further.
Indeed. In this case, they're releasing the first couple books of a series for free--then you have to buy the rest, either by the normal method or by their Webscription. (Frankly, I hope more of these books come out by Webscription. Cheap, fast, and easy to put on my Palm.:) --
Eric Flint may be relatively new, but David Drake and David Weber are both old hands in the publishing game. Drake's been writing for something like at least 20 years, and probably best known for the Hammer's Slammers tank-mercenaries series of novels and stories. Weber's Honor Harrington books are also quite popular among military SF fans, and are also a homage to the Admiral Horatio Hornblower books of old.
This is a method of publicity, yes--but then, Baen considers its entire Webscription program itself to be little more a method of publicity, as low as the prices are that it charges--and there are those better-known authors who are incensed at having to sell their books so cheaply (and without DRM copy-protection to boot). --
Well, it's easy enough to put them on your Palm if you have one. That's how I read them . . . and then the sequels, after I got hooked on the Bellisarius books and shelled out for the Webscription months containing them. If you don't have a PDA, well, what are you waiting for, go out and get one.;) --
It's definitely great that you do want to pay--that's kind of what Flint believed and caused him to start the Free Library in the first place, that most people do want to pay legitimately for content. I don't think they have a way to pay for the free books yet, though I think they're batting around the idea of setting up a PayPal account for those who do want to kick in for them.
For now, it seems like the best way to pay and prove them right is to go out and buy a physical copy (either locally or via some online place like BooksaMillion) of the same book. Then, if you don't want it cluttering your shelves, give it away to a friend or donate it to a library or something. --
Not a one of the 2-threshhold posts I've been reading has yet mentioned the PayPal micropayment system. Isn't that a viable micropayment system?
I mean, sure, you have to sign up for it, but what with all the paperwork surrounding banks and credit cards these days, it's almost a certainty that you'd have to sign up for whatever micropayment system came along anyway. And sure, it charges businesses a transaction fee, but not as big of one as credit card companies (and micropay systems have to make their money somehow anyway).
You can send a little as a penny with PayPal (though you have to put a dollar in your account to do it), and I've seen quite a few people (like the Alice Comics guy) putting "click here to drop some coins in my hat"-type links with it on their webpages (and then reporting being surprised at the number of people who donated with them). What does PayPal lack to make it a viable micropayment system for the 'net? --
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about what happened in Luxembourg--I wish I'd heard about this pre-con, so I could have asked him about it--but the rights thing over Galactica is such a huge mess that, if it was more than a couple years ago, I'm not surprised, and I really wouldn't blame Richard for it. Apparently Glen Larsen discovering that he had some residual rights to some elements of (but not all of) the show via the episodes he wrote knocked the whole thing into a cocked hat, and nobody knew exactly who had what rights anymore. Hatch has been trying the best he can to get the whole thing ironed out, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this new wrinkle. One thing's for sure--Hatch's fans can swing a lot of letter-writing power. Call it a "snail-mail Slashdot effect." The Sci-Fi channel abruptly dropped their plans for a Galactica update last month--though I'll admit it might have been due partly to Singer's sudden interest in the franchise.
As far as creative vision is concerned, Hatch is clearly no duffer. He's actually written--and I don't mean Shatnerly-ghost-written, I mean written--a trilogy taking Galactica into the future, and the storyline of that trilogy is roughly the way the new show would go.
The trailer is really slick, with some great footage (albeit perhaps a bit of overacting), a special appearance by Lorne Greene, and CGI done by volunteers that looks incredibly polished. There's one shot of a Viper zooming through an open tunnel in one side of a starship and out the other that never failed to elicit gasps of awe from the audience. It's amazing how slick and polished it looks--you'd swear it was from a finished product. Hatch tells stories of screening it to studio execs who were sort of embarrassed going in, expecting to see someone's home video, and then had to pick their jaws up off the floor when it showed.
There are some still frames from the trailer on the BattlestarGalactica.com website, but due to SAG rules (having to do with the actors actually having to be paid and stuff), they can't put the whole thing online or otherwise make it available. So they screen it at cons.
Hatch has always expressed a willingness to work with whoever got the rights--even Larsen, though Larson rebuffed him (and Larsen's involvement with the Singer version doesn't give me a whole lot of hope). Hatch can also swing most of the still-alive original cast--even the reclusive Dirk Benedict. All he wants is to ensure that the new series has the same things that kept people watching the old series--the original cast in their original roles. All the other proposed BSG projects have been planned to focus elsewhere--on other elements in the BSG universe. Hatch can understand that the studios might prefer to swap in new faces, but all he wants is that there should be a segueway from the old to the new, with more than lip service paid to the original. One of his great fears (and mine, too) is that they'll do a recast and remake, a la the Lost in Space movie that Bill Mumy lobbied for and was then shut out of.
The problem with Hatch, as I imagine the "suits" in charge of studios see it, is that he's a starry-eyed dreamer, with a Vision. That so overshadows the other aspect of him--his business sense, and ability to make much out of limited resources--that it's no wonder the suits get scared. After all, other dreamers with creative vision in the past have made major holes in studio pocketbooks--just look at Kevin Costner.
Still, the open letters and interviews posted to the BSG site lately do give me hope, especially the fandom.com interview with DeSanto in which he says he respects and admires Hatch for keeping the fandom alive and would like to see his trailer. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
(Another trailer Hatch showed at the con was his new project, The Great War of Magellan . This one is also an unfinished teaser, but the storyline looks promising and it has quite a few interesting faces in it--Hatch, Jason Carter, Brad Dourif . . . have to wait and see what develops there, too.)
--
Of course, since the NS2K costs a couple hundred dollars, it's not exactly an optimal solution for most people . . .
--
Yes, and Napigator works, too. The only thing is, when Napster's official servers close down, the OpenNap servers may experience their own "Napster flood" effect. I've already been unable to connect to some of the more popular opennap servers from time to time because of user limits.
--
That's not the way I remember it. I'd always been told that America nationalized the Aspirin trademark during World War II, since it was held by a German company and this was a way to get back at them.
--
Of course, this was really only to be expected from K-mart, which tries to have "family friendly" as its middle name. Note that K-mart also promised to start carding for mature-rated computer games last October. (I don't know whether it actually does or not, as I haven't had any mature-rated video games come through my line since then. K-mart seems to card for just about everything else, though--alcohol, cigarettes, lighters, lighter fluid, non-tobacco imitation cigarettes and snuff--that's right, you have to be over 18 to buy shredded mint leaves!--knives, tire irons, even wheel ramps and cans of fix-a-flat--we can't have a little kiddie inflate someone to death, can we?--and so forth.)
--
One thing worth noting, though, from the courses in LibSci I've taken myself, is that any movies a library buys are more expensive, because they're sold without that "FBI warning" on the front that says you can't copy, display publically, loan, etc. etc. the movie--because along with that copy, they're buying the rights to do exactly that.
--
I have to admit, one thing I noticed after I got a digital watch that displayed the day of the week was that I suddenly had a bit of trouble remembering what day of the week it was when I wasn't wearing a watch. Now when I leave my PDA behind, darn do I ever know it. And miss it. I keep my life in that little critter. When my parents' home 800 number changes, I no longer bother to memorize it. Likewise my schedule, or what room my classes are in. Boy am I in trouble when I forget it! :)
--
Yeah, it sounds silly. But then, so does Pillsbury C&Ding a bunch of software developers for use of the term 'bakeoff'.
--
. . . but I've held off enough. You can get your Transformers fix right here.
--
"Worlds Without End" is the one where a malfunctioning disentigrator ray tears a hole in spacetime to a universe where Cobra won, involving such happy fun things as the 'Joes happening upon skeletons in the desert wearing their dogtags, and Steeler getting bitten by an infectious bug and getting delirious and hallucinating, and declaring that they're all dead and they've gone to hell (though they can't use the word "hell" due to BS&P).
That's a mindfuck.
--
The original G.I. Joe cartoon, at its best, was a thinking man's show, or almost. It had some terrific episodes, such the two-parter "Worlds Without End," which was recently released on video, and may just make me break my "DVD only" dictum if it doesn't hit the shiny disc soon. I defy anyone to watch that show without shivering--it's a creepy SF/horror story that could have come right off the Twilight Zone. That episode should be pictured in the dictionary under the term "mindf*ck," it's just that good.
--
Which is how come when that water-squirting G2 came out, they could call him Go-Bots--and how they could call those later, Hot-Wheels compatible Transformers "Go-Bots" too.
--
The odd thing is, the Transformers toys sold a lot better than the original Japanese toys on which they'd been based--revitalizing Japanese toy manufacturer Takara, who made most of the original Generation One toys, and still continues (in partnership with Hasbro) to make Transformers to this day. In fact, the Transformers cartoon became popular enough in Japan itself to spawn three new animé series (Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory), an OAV (Zone), and myriad manga, after the franchise's demise in America. In Japan and Europe, Transformers never really died out--a lot of the "Generation Two" and "Machine Wars" toys were American re-issues of European or Japanese product.
Why do so many people think fondly of Transformers? Well, the writing of the shows, though occasionally juvenile, still managed to be sufficiently mature that not just kids but teens and even some adults could enjoy it. It portrayed all the characters as being three-dimensional--even the villains, who could have friendships, motivations, and respect for their adversaries, and who never resorted to the kiddie-show characterization of referring to themselves as "evil". To this day, there is a strident faction of Decepticon devotees active in fandom, who insist that the Deceps were misunderstood and that their "survival of the fittest" philosophy was actually in Cybertron's best interests. The show had some silly episodes, and some that make even the most devoted fans cringe--but at its best, it could really make you stop and think. You just don't find that kind of depth in most other kids' shows of that day, and even less in such shows of today.
And that's just the TV show. There were comic books, too--80-some in the US (plus the 12-issue Generation 2 miniseries), 300-some in the UK--whose storyline was nearly entirely different from the show, and which featured some terrific writing--especially toward the end, during Simon Furman's run. These were a lot more mature than the TV show, with a more serious storyline and more room for characterization.
As for the later stuff--while not as good as the original, Beast Wars did have quite a few good points. It's too bad they fired the creative staff and went on to make that god-awful Beast Machines thing afterward.
As for GoBots . . . well, I'll agree with you that the toys were pretty cool (the ones I saw, at least). But the episode or two of the TV show that I caught didn't seem to live up to the sort of thing I saw in Transformers. It may just be a matter of personal preference, though.
Anyway, I've written a bit more about TF fandom in this article. Feel free to check it out.
--
John Moschitta, Jr., aka The Micromachine Man (also known for his FedEx commercials back in the day)? He's still around--in fact, he attended BotCon last year. There are some interesting convention reports on fan webpages about his panel.
--
People played with their toys back then--so it became super-rare to find any of them in good condition. Scarcity drives price--and for a complete set, of course you'll pay more than you would for individual items, just for all the work it took the guy to assemble it.
Nowadays, everyone's collecting toys--and so, ironically, it will be decades before they're worth anything--if ever. Which means, I guess, that now toys really are just for playing with.
--
The confusion may stem from the rare TFTM music score CDs, issued for the BotCon convention (and occasionally findable on eBay or Napster--search on the word "botcon"), featuring rerecordings of all the instrumental music from Transformers: The Movie.
For the CD, Vince DiCola modified the instrumental piece from that part of the movie slightly, dropping in an instrumental version of the "Dare to Be Stupid" synthesizer riff to substitute for the music played at that point in the movie, which of course could not be included on that CD.
--
(As long as this story about Transformers is up, I should probably plug the rec.toys.transformers.moderated newsgroup which I help to moderate, as well as the article about Transformers fandom that I wrote a while back. And the yearly Transformers convention, BotCon, which will be in Carolina this year.)
--
The article also mentions Themestream, a site which has earned me a good bit of money (and enabled me to make a couple hundred buck donation to help keep Nausicaa.net going). Too bad it's now only paying two cents per hit...
--
Here is a great page of zero-tolerance horror stories, courtesy of Randy Cassingham, editor of the This Is True email newsletter. Randy doesn't like Zero Tolerance much, either. (I passed on the links to the stories about the Canadian boy to him.)
--
--
This is a method of publicity, yes--but then, Baen considers its entire Webscription program itself to be little more a method of publicity, as low as the prices are that it charges--and there are those better-known authors who are incensed at having to sell their books so cheaply (and without DRM copy-protection to boot).
--
Well, it's easy enough to put them on your Palm if you have one. That's how I read them . . . and then the sequels, after I got hooked on the Bellisarius books and shelled out for the Webscription months containing them. If you don't have a PDA, well, what are you waiting for, go out and get one. ;)
--
For now, it seems like the best way to pay and prove them right is to go out and buy a physical copy (either locally or via some online place like BooksaMillion) of the same book. Then, if you don't want it cluttering your shelves, give it away to a friend or donate it to a library or something.
--
Actually, that's not true anymore.
PayPal is now available in the following countries:
--
I mean, sure, you have to sign up for it, but what with all the paperwork surrounding banks and credit cards these days, it's almost a certainty that you'd have to sign up for whatever micropayment system came along anyway. And sure, it charges businesses a transaction fee, but not as big of one as credit card companies (and micropay systems have to make their money somehow anyway).
You can send a little as a penny with PayPal (though you have to put a dollar in your account to do it), and I've seen quite a few people (like the Alice Comics guy) putting "click here to drop some coins in my hat"-type links with it on their webpages (and then reporting being surprised at the number of people who donated with them). What does PayPal lack to make it a viable micropayment system for the 'net?
--