Um ... nobody saw me do that, right?
Or that?
Okay, good....
I hope they come here. Especially Sophlady, who needs a good whack from my clue-by-four. I almost signed up for the site just to answer her, but USA Today asks entirely too many intrusive questions (why should they know things like my sex, let alone my job title???). But this one made me steam:
Quote:
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Project Gutenberg is completely separate and becoming obsolete. That is because all the major ebook sellers offer the same books free. The versions downloaded from Amazon, iBooks, Copia, etc., are usually better - digitized instead of scanned, and with cover art.
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What. The. Hey?
Project Gutenberg is less obsolete now than it ever has been. I bought my ebook reader specifically to read PG. With the rise of ebook readers, netbooks, and tablets, it's gone from a niche site that a few weirdos who like to read on their computer or their PDA use to downright mainstream.
Unlike "the major ebook sellers" its books are available to anyone, in any country, on any platform, with no DRM, no platform lock-in, no geographic restrictions, and no lending restrictions. And unlike "the major ebook sellers" those books are
free -- which is
not the case for the majority of them from the majority of bookstores. Stores don't make money from giving away books.
And what does "digitized instead of scanned" mean? Is she trying to say that someone at Amazon slowly typed in every word of, say, Tom Sawyer? Pardon me while I laugh myself sick. Every pbook that is turned into an ebook is scanned. And therefore, by definition, digitized. I'm seriously not sure what she's talking about there.
I do know, though, that the PG ebooks are very, very carefully proofread by the Distributed Proofreading project, and come up almost as good as the even more exact, more carefully and lovingly proofread books that can be found here on MobileRead. Unless the stores, or the people selling through them, have just copied books from PG and stripped off the identifying text (which happens a
lot), their books are no better, and often worse (sometimes
much worse ... raw, un-OCR'd scans, anyone?) than PG's ebooks. And I would not pay extra for the "covers" (generally stock with the titles unevenly capitalized) slapped across most ebooks by the bookstores and the people who read "make a fortune selling free PD ebooks"; the ones that PG (or ManyBooks, Feedbooks, or MobileRead) has are at least that good, and often better, especially if the original cover is legal. Munsey's ... well, let's leave out the issue of their covers entirely. But, thankfully, since (unlike the books from "the major sellers") their books are free of DRM, I can install my own covers, which are anything but that old copy of Munsey's magazine they use.
Oh ... I hope nobody saw that, either. Um, I think I'd better go clean up.