Quote:
Originally Posted by alexxxm
It's a real pleasure to find some gems like "A Selection of Curious Articles from the Gentleman's Magazine" (1811).
It really seems to me that Sony and Amazon are not battling for the same ground, the Reader and the Kindle are becoming two devices used very differently. Mainly DRM and contemporary works on one side, mainly open content and a treasure of public domain works on the other.
I found it also beautiful to have the digital text preceded by some scanned pages showing the graphics of the cover and the library stamps, it gives you some flavour of the book paper if you will...
alessandro
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Blue
I was very excited when I first read the OP. I immediately downloaded a book published in 1813 that I’ve wanted for years. Although I found many mistakes due to the rendering of the OCR software, I nonetheless was thrilled that I had a copy to read on my Reader. Until now I could only read it on my computer screen because of Google Book’s previous PDF format (which was actually individual jpg pages that wouldn’t render on the Reader.) Acquiring a hard copy was not even an option. This is an obscure book of memoirs of one of my ancestors, therefore would never become a mainstream electronic book of interest to the masses. There are many other obscure books of this nature which would never be considered classics in the accepted sense, yet are precious reads to me, poor formatting, warts and all. I, for one, happily accept these offerings as they currently exist, while at the same time hope that these books will be cleaned up and more readily readable in the near future.
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Exactly! This gives us the edges of the book world.
Previous:
- many modern copyrighted ebooks: buy, or borrow from your library.
- the most popular Public Domain (PD) ebooks (i.e., the Classics): Mobileread and Project Gutenberg.
Now, add:
- all the rest of the PD world.
And the fact that additions are ongoing, and corrections are accepted and ongoing (meanwhile, check the PDF for indecipherable paragraphs), makes this something great, no?
What's not to like? We're now given more ebook reading choices, the obscure, hard-to-find treasures. A couple of years ago, getting digitized copies of these would have been thought to be the unconquerable portion of the book universe. Instead, the miracle of Google has brought them to us. And people are complaining? What am I missing?