On 10/30/2012 01:33 AM, Greg Newby wrote:
We haven't emailed books before, but I agree it might be desirable. I can think of some details that matter (i.e., preventing emailing books to strangers; books that are too big for email).
That would be very hard to do in a secure way. We'd have to check each person's email to avoid people spamming other people's Kindles with big files or with unappropriate content. We'd have to implement a full fledged user system, with email address, password and email confirmation. This is confidential data and quite impossible to keep secret on a system like ibiblio, where all web servers run as user nobody. Furthermore Amazon could easily block that if they wanted because our IP adress would be known. They probably have a big spam filter already that would block us anyway. And it would be a wrong political signal. Why should a volunteer organization work hard to make a the crappy devices of a multi-billion company user-friendly? After all it is not PG being user-unfriendly but Amazon. Our politics should be to make people complain to Amazon. The solution is quite easy: Ask Amazon to implement a function in Silk that lets user save books to the "Books" tab. Make lots of people ask. Regards -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org