Free (iTunes) Protecting Our Tomorrows by Anne Geddes [Medical Awareness Photography]

[ATDrake]

Protecting Our Tomorrows: Portraits of Meningococcal Disease by noted photographer Anne Geddes (Wikipedia entry) is a medical humanitarian photography book filled with pictures and stories of persons living with and some info to boost awareness about, made in conjunction with a number of organizations dedicated to the disease, free courtesy of publisher Sourcebooks.

This is actually pretty nice even if the actual disease-info bits are a bit skimpy, and the e-book equivalent of a coffee-table book.

Currently free @ iTunes (available to Canadians). Doesn't even exist in the other stores, as far as I can tell, and I think it uses some fancy made-for-iBooks formatting anyway, even if it's not officially labeled as such.

This is a 60 meg file, so people who pay-per-bandwidth used on their iDevice's wireless may prefer to download/sideload.

Description
World famous photographer Anne Geddes has teamed up with Novartis Vaccines and the Confederation of Meningitis Organizations (CoMo) to create Protecting Our Tomorrows: Portraits of Meningococcal Disease.

Protecting Our Tomorrows stands to raise awareness amongst communities regarding the threat of meningococcal disease and the importance of prevention. This beautiful book features fifteen survivors and their families from many different countries and cultures. Each survivor is featured in a stunning photograph by Anne Geddes to show the profound effect meningococcal disease can have on those infected and stresses the importance of early detection and prevention.

[ymmv]

Wouldn't it have been better to post all these deals in existing threads instead of cluttering the forum with individual deal postings?

[ATDrake]

No, personally I don't consider that it would in the case of official publisher freebies, and have not done so for years, for reasons I have repeatedly stated when the discussion has come up.

I've also repeatedly stated that I'm not averse to having a dedicated subforum just for the time-limited official-publisher freebies so that interested people can find them more easily amidst all the obfuscating bargains and discussions posts and that people not interested can just ignore them and would have no objections to creating new individual freebie threads only in said subforum and/or having the existing ones moved.

Not to mention a number of offerings, such as this one, sometimes have intersectionality which makes them fit strongly into more than one category for which we often don't have dedicated threads which would mean creating a new one anyway just for the freebie.

However, I'm sorry if this bothers you and you can easily block seeing the individual title postings if you do Ignore This User via my username dropdown.

[ymmv]

Your argument doesn't make a lick of sense in the links you posted. You want to post in separate threads in order to combine deals from different stores? But the deal threads are store agnostic ... You' want a separate free deals forum and since there isn't one you keep posting each freebie as a separate posting? But how difficult would it be to use a thread of your own where you post all your freebies? You don't need a separate forum for freebies opposed to bargains.

Your advice to ignorie your postings doesn't remove the threads you started.

It looks to me you think your own postings are too important to adhere to general posting guidelines for the other forum members.

[ATDrake]

No, the argument is that I generally prefer individual posts just for the time-limited freebies offered by official publishers, often in multiple stores, because I find them much more flexible and convenient to skim over in terms of easily spotting an interesting-looking free book if one is only interested picking up the free books.

1. Whether a megathread is dedicated to a particular publisher or genre, it tends to wind up with discussion and off-topic postings which are essentially clutter for people following it just for the freebies (or following it for the bargains, which end up being another form of clutter for the freebie-only people).

IMHO, dedicated individual threads confine follow-up discussion about a freebie to just that thread, so that people can talk about the book without subjecting other people who may not be interested in that particular book to having additional, possibly lengthy, posts to scroll through/give a false impression that a new deal has been posted.

2. And as I have noted, often freebies are repeated/extend for longer than a single month and/or don't fit neatly into a single category for which we have a dedicated subgenre thread available.

But often they are only available for a very limited time, so while it's possible to alleviate the frustration of clicking on something to find that it's no longer free by only checking the last few posts in the thread, it means one can also miss out on a longer-term freebie that's available for the entire month because it appeared earlier than the one that expired after a day.

And people would still have to look over all the posts in a thread just to spot the single thing that might interest them, instead of just looking over what amounts to a list of titles.

I myself find it much simpler and easier to make an individual thread (or a grouped thread for a set of related things like literary short stories) with a suggested genres-this-might-fit-in, which allows people to easily scan over just the title of the thread to see what it is and where it can be gotten without even having to open the thread and read the posts if it's something they don't care for, and from other posters' comments in the overall discussion in the links I gave, I don't seem to be the only one.

(ETA: Sorry, that actually happened in a completely different thread, and MR members' comments on their view of the usefulness of individual threads for the freebies starts with posts here and here and here and here.)

For example [Meteorological Disaster Thriller], can be skipped by people who aren't interested in meteorology, distaster novels, or thrillers, but people who normally wouldn't read thrillers or subscribe to any Thriller thread yet are interested in meteorology in any setting may see something potentially of interest which they might like to try, without having to repeat the same post in multiple genre threads, which I've done before this month for a zombie detective thing written by a noted sci-fi author.

3. And quite frankly, it's a lot more convenient when I or another poster can just bump up an old individual thread with a note of "Free again in store X and Y, but not Z" if it repeats or appears in a new venue instead of copy-pasting the info again into a new post in a megathread (not to mention doing a search for said megathread in the first place if it's not a popular one).

4. The suggestion of the separate subforum for just the freebies is to quarantine the resulting individual freebie threads both to make it easy for people who don't like them to ignore, while enabling people who do to find them more easily.

I apologize for the Ignore function not working to hide threads I started like I thought it would, and will space them out so there aren't more than 2-3 per day while I sort through the backlog of freebies I have yet to post (some of which appear to Canadian-exclusive glitches which may expire at any moment, others of which seem to have remained free for months, and some of which fit no readily available category for any of the potentially-relevant megathreads I've been able to locate).

[murg]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

1. Whether a megathread is dedicated to a particular publisher or genre, it tends to wind up with discussion and off-topic postings which are essentially clutter for people following it just for the freebies (or following it for the bargains, which end up being another form of clutter the freebie-only people).

Yeah, I agree with you. Cluttering up a single thread, such as the monthly Christian interest thread, is much, much worse than cluttering up the whole forum.

[Froide]

Originally Posted by ymmv

Wouldn't it have been better to post all these deals in existing threads instead of cluttering the forum with individual deal postings?

This.

I'd appreciate your posts more if they were posted to genre-specific threads. Finds that straddle genres can be cross-posted to the relevant threads.

FYI, most MR freebies/deals are limited-time, so your finds are not unique in that sense.

[haydnfan]

I hope that all of these threads are deleted. They are cluttering up the forum.

[KentE]

Sorry to clutter up this thread!, but.... forum rules permit, sometimes encourage, and sometimes force postings of individual threads rather than posting to sub-genre threads. There are certainly no rules forcing posting to genre-specific threads.
I appreciate both strategies, but it seems that it's only recently that the explosion of genre-threads has become common here, and I'm not certain that it's always a good thing. The genre-specific threads make it 'easier' for me to skim the forum for my 'usual suspects', at the risk of missing stuff that I'd probably enjoy.
ATDrake's title lines are almost always specific enough to allow those not interested to skip the thread (and far more specific than genre-threads), while it isn't always possible to skip a large discussion taking place in the middle of a genre-specific thread. (No way to separate your personal 'wheat from the chaff' inside a genre thread.) And the observation that it makes it easy to link a repeat freebie to older discussion is certainly true.

I'm FAR more likely to benefit from ATDrake's posts when they're individual threads, because I've grown to have a great respect for the breadth of ATDrake's knowledge about books and awareness of the market as well as being aware of the number of posts that are cross-genre rather than genre-specific-- while I'd be more likely to miss those posts if they were in genre-threads.

So, my vote: Post away, ATDrake, any way you see fit. (And thanks!)

KentE

[ymmv]

You're right that ATDrake raises awareness for books you'd otherwise miss. Personally I'm only interested in crime and fantasy SF books, but thanks to ATDrake's prolific postings now I'm aware of free books about raising your kids as good Christians, heartwarming animal tales or multicultural gay firefighter/immigrant porn.

[Dr. Drib]

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