greg said:
I edited a disclaimer at the top of the review, ... and, mentioned on the main page that it's the Webmaster's review, not Project Gutenberg's review.
well, gee. i'm a little disappointed in you, greg. i mean, i tell don not to get his knickers in a twist, because greg will obviously swoop in and fix this... and then, greg, you stumble in with this non-fix... only one part of the complaints was that p.g. wasn't sufficiently distanced from this "review". the _main_ complaint, though, was a reaction that the "review" itself is "not what p.g. does". and the more-relevant sub-complaint is that the "review" doesn't seem to be very balanced. *** anyway... again, on-going posting of this so-called "review" isn't gonna mean the end of the world. people get tech advice everywhere, so this is just one more bit. we have to assume p.g. end-users have intelligence, and thus will recognize this rant for the rant that it is. just to put this in perspective... but this isn't good tech advice, not by a long shot, and people will recognize that it's primarily spite, so it won't exert much effect, other than to make _p.g._ look kinda bad. yes, that's right; it backfires. the main point is that it's hard to load in content. but first there's a whole paragraph of bitching that ultimately ends with "turn the machine face-down if you don't want to see ads", which is good advice, but also already quite obvious to thinking people... so eliminate that bitching paragraph, and condense the advice down to a single sentence as i just put it. but the worst part is yet to come. the piece leads off with "don't buy the kindle fire". ok, great, i'm glad we got _that_ out of the way... yet in the closing section which is given the heading of "to read project gutenberg e-books on your kindle fire", the steps are:
1. don't buy a kindle fire.
seems to be a bit out of place, given the heading, eh? besides, it's a bit repetitive, not?
2. if you already bought a kindle fire, return it.
again, the section is _supposed_to_be_ about how to download p.g. e-books to your kindle fire, am i right? so this second point seems not to be relevant. right? and by now, even the repetition is getting repetitive.
3. if you can't return it, e-mail yourself the e-book.
well, ok, we note the continuing assertion of the theme. but at least we finally get to the purpose of the section. now, the "review" doesn't state it as plainly as i did, but the _act_ is to e-mail the e-book to your kindle account. this option -- to put non-amazon stuff on your kindle by e-mailing it to an address (for your account) that is furnished, by amazon, for free -- has been available to people within the kindle infrastructure for a while now. so here's my question: if an e-book can be e-mailed to an end-user's kindle account, why doesn't p.g. do that? give people a button that collects their e-mail address then automatically e-mails the e-book to that address. seems to me that _project_gutenberg needs to make it easy for us to put p.g. e-books on our kindle accounts. of course, then marcello won't have stuff to bitch about. -bowerbird