the washington post article said:
Even though it’s not illegal, Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation chief executive Greg Newby finds the practice unethical. He would like to see Amazon offer Project Gutenberg texts at no cost and DRM-free.
if greg _really_ wants that, he could make it happen, easily, by setting up project gutenberg as a publisher who distributes its e-books through amazon, because publishers set the price, and can turn off amazon d.r.m. and until p.g. does that, other rogue re-publishers will continue to take advantage of the door p.g. left open... *** here's someone who took jim's "magic catalog" and turned it into a for-sale e-book, albeit for just $.99...
http://www.amazon.com/Download-Gutenberg-CATALOG-download-ebook/dp/B004BDOWP... there are also versions for feedbooks and mobileread. *** and even though i thought the tone was a bit off, the point behind the article was a rather good one, in the sense that kindle owners do need to be told -- directly, and perhaps often -- they can populate their machines with content not bought from amazon. *** walter said:
It only proves that ease of access and a nice representation are valued over just having the content available
that's right, as far as it goes, just as long as we recognize the caveat that many of these rogue re-publishers do _not_ create books that have "a nice representation". they just take whatever was there, with absolutely no concern at all for the quality of the product. *** walter said:
It only proves that ease of access and a nice representation are valued over just having the content available in archaic ASCII-formats.
kudos to walter for trying to smuggle in a political point. but ascii is _not_ "archaic". it's the 128 lower bits of utf-8. and utf-16. and all the other various older encodings too. walter was trying to make you think something like .html is superior. i will agree that an .html book _does_ look nice, at least if you are viewing it with a browser or some other piece of software that understands how to render that .html. (otherwise, an .html-book is _painful_ to read, lacking that.) but it's important to remember that that .html itself is _also_ comprised mainly of the lower 128 bits that walter claims are "archaic". so obviously he's not telling us the _whole_ truth... it's also tremendously meaningful and relevant and important to understand that -- if you route the p.g, ascii-format through a viewer-program that understands how to render that format -- you will _also_ get a book that looks nice. and one that can have just as much power -- or even more -- than an .html book has... indeed, the iphone app "eucalyptus" takes exactly that approach. and its output looks just as good as an .html-book or an .epub... so it's simply not true -- at all -- that ascii is "archaic", no sir. it _is_ unfortunate that project gutenberg has never seen fit to distribute a viewer-program that makes its plain-text format look nice and be powerful. but that's not the fault of the format. -bowerbird