Shut up and take my money already

[kestrell]

That's the meme Alexx told me about this morning while I was grousing about how I would really like to give the musician my money, if only the MP3 of his song was available through quote legitimate unquote means, as opposed to having to convert the YouTube video to MP3 as it is the only source I could find for the single. This is the second time this happened to me this week, and it's only Wednesday.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Wordy wordy wordy!

I want to give a little money to my local feminist bookstore so I'll have somewhere to browse and read magazines and employ my pals. But right now they can't sell anything but ebooks, and Google Books at that. Which are no longer going to be supported after sometime soon (lost the link, sorry) so it's like buying something that will spontaneously combust!

[kestrell]

Wow! I was just explaining to a friend of mine how DRM'ed ebooks are just like the publisher shooting themselves in the foot, since you can't convert the ebooks to other formats to be read on other devices, and how DRM pretty much emans "not accessible" anyway, if you use a screen reader. So again, piratical means become the only way to access the media you want, as people find ways to crack formats like Kindle just so they read their own books on other devices. But hey! I actually found my first example of a Daisy format ebook on archive.org which is actually accessible, and mostly complete, except for a few pages of the table of contents. Check it out, it's _The Omnibus of Crime_, edited by Dorothy Sayers, with a still-very-relevant introductory essay on the overlap of crime fiction and horror, and how crime fiction goes back tothe Old Testament.

[jesse_the_k]

I misremembered. It's not that owners of Google Ebooks will be stranded; it's that they will no longer be partnering with brick-and-mortar stores.

I found the link, from the wonderful Teleread.com blog
http://bit.ly/NoBrickGBook

and a followup from the Big Thinkers at the blog:
http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/disappointed-by-google/

On the other matter, you had me at Sayers — I love her writing in every regard (well not the Xian stuff).

[kestrell]

Teleread is definitely the go-to blog for quality information about ebooks--I read it devotedly for years, and only unsubscribed earlier this year because I am now spending so little time online, but Teleread can still suck me in.

A few of Sayers books are early enough to get through the copyright cut-off date, so I would point you to archive.org and then do a search for Dorothy Sayers and select "texts" from the combo box.

I was very excited to find the _Omnibus_, for which I've been searching for in etext format for years. I had a paper copy of _Omnibus of Crime_, which is still a classic for early horror, mystery, anddetective fiction, but the paper copy disintegrated while I was attempting to scan it. There should be a word for the way pages come loose and flutter to the opposite side of the room while one is attempting to scan the thinning pages, never to be found again--perhaps a loss of pages?

A couple of years back, I collected and/or scanned all the Lord Peter books, if you are interested in having them in ebook form. Alexx got hooked on them also, so I think they've also all been proofread for scannos.

[jesse_the_k]

Congrats on spending less time online, I think.

I know I've tried to read everything by Sayers except somehow I didn't know about this one book. I'm clicking my way through the wonders of the Open Library system. So far, usability for the win.

(Teleread scribes are quite verbose — I read 'em here on the feed reader and it's often half my d-roll. Still, this might be useful info if I attend a cocktail party someday.)