Thread: Professor blasts e-books over unfulfilled promise
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Old 09-20-2013, 01:24 AM   #111
Rev. Bob
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady View Post
Copyrighted photos, lyrics, etc. that are used in books now need to be cleared and paid for too.

I'm not talking about creating new material, but using existing material for nonfiction books--and a lot of that may be public domain; look at all the material over at the Internet Archive, for example.
Heck, I'd be happy if more ebooks included basic stuff like cover art and recent text.

Thanks to the Kobo sale, I've picked up electronic copies of some of my favorite classic SF novels. Despite all but one of them using pretty cover art in the Kobo store to sell the books, none of them actually came with that art. This is even true of some books that are only a couple of years old!

Further, it's been several years since three of Heinlein's books were rereleased in expanded form - specifically, Podkayne of Mars got the original postlude back (in addition to the originally-published one) and both The Puppet Masters and Stranger in a Strange Land got full-fledged "uncut" releases. Of those three, only The Puppet Masters is available in its "correct" expanded form; the other texts date back to the mid-80s.

Yeah, extras would be nice - but I'd much rather see 'em get the basics right first. I strongly suspect that the cover art issue boils down to contract rights - to which I say, pay the artist and get the rights!
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