Thanks everyone for your comments on the site. I've spent many many hours of my free time over the last few years on it, and I encourage the comments--both positive and negative.
In response to some of Worldwalker's comments, I nowhere state that I alone have digitally converted all the ebooks. Reformatted the texts to multiple formats and added linked TOCs: yes. Made covers for them: yes. Selected them, read them, and posted reviews of them (with the help of my mom and guest bloggers, thanks Maggie!): yes, yes, yes. I and many of our visitors see the site not just as an ebook resource but possibly even more as way to discover and browse for new reading material.
On both the "About" page and "Why Donate?" page, I fully acknowledge that we get most (not all) of our free ebook texts from Gutenberg. On the "Why Donate?" page I also have a link to donate to Gutenberg. I do not simply rip off the ebooks from Gutenberg to pass off as my own while requesting donations. If something on the site gave you that impression, please let me know what. I don't want anyone taking away this idea from the site. On the "Why Donate?" page, I say we are requesting donations *for server costs only*. And as Maggie stated, I also understood from the Gutenberg legal terms that all references to Gutenberg must be removed from their texts when changing them in any way.
Regarding the sexism comment--the site started as a way to find historical works by women authors that are virtually unknown today and get people reading them. I suppose it's a matter of personal opinion, but I personally don't find publishing only female authors offensive. We have given thoughts to publishing some works by men on the site, and my mom even bought a domain name to start a site publishing ebooks by men only, but as we keep finding so many unknown and marvelous books by women, we simply haven't had time to give it more thought.
For the contemporary ebooks we publish, we welcome submissions by both men and women provided that the content appeals to our primarily female readership.
|