Cory Doctorow?

[Nate the great]

Does anyone know where I can find good clean copies of Doctorow's books?

I tried his site, but the copies there look absolutely horrible. Most are missing covers, have incorrect metatdata, and the formatting made me want to claw my eyes out.

help?

[JSWolf]

Check the library here at MR.

[Nate the great]

Did.

It has a couple titles, but they're all old.

[JSWolf]

Which books are you looking for?

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Does anyone know where I can find good clean copies of Doctorow's books?

I tried his site, but the copies there look absolutely horrible. Most are missing covers, have incorrect metatdata, and the formatting made me want to claw my eyes out.

help?

Doctorow has 15 of his books free on his website now. I think that the selection keeps changing, so you may want to keep checking back.

I can't vouch, really, for the quality. I have seen part of the inside of a couple of the ebooks, and they looked fine. An author's probably going to make sure of that on his/her own website.

http://craphound.com/.

And, if anyone breathes a word about me posting fiction, I will vehemently deny it.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Doctorow has 15 of his books free on his website now. I think that the selection keeps changing, so you may want to keep checking back.

I can't vouch, really, for the quality. I have seen part of the inside of a couple of the ebooks, and they looked fine. An author's probably going to make sure of that on his/her own website.

http://craphound.com/.

And, if anyone breathes a word about me posting fiction, I will vehemently deny it.

/\ did not read original post /\

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

/\ did not read original post /\

Mea culpa.

[bgalbrecht]

From what I recall of Cory's website, the deal is that he puts up a single format of each book he releases to creative commons (I don't remember which format, but it's not ePub), and then encourages people to convert them to other formats and he puts up the first contribution for each format on his website. Furthermore, these versions are missing the covers because his publisher paid for the cover art, and these are not the publisher editions, so unless the artist has also contributed their cover to creative commons, Cory doesn't have the rights to include the cover.

Unfortunately, this means that some of the editions on his website are actually poorly formatted, and won't ever get replaced by better versions. So, if you don't like the version you downloaded, feel free to grab the original format and convert it and clean it up for yourself, buy the publisher edition, or suffer the poor formatting.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

From what I recall of Cory's website, the deal is that he puts up a single format of each book he releases to creative commons (I don't remember which format, but it's not ePub), and then encourages people to convert them to other formats and he puts up the first contribution for each format on his website. Furthermore, these versions are missing the covers because his publisher paid for the cover art, and these are not the publisher editions, so unless the artist has also contributed their cover to creative commons, Cory doesn't have the rights to include the cover.

Unfortunately, this means that some of the editions on his website are actually poorly formatted, and won't ever get replaced by better versions. So, if you don't like the version you downloaded, feel free to grab the original format and convert it and clean it up for yourself, buy the publisher edition, or suffer the poor formatting.

I hadn't considered the point about the cover licensing, thanks.

But I am not sure it is relevant here; I have seen CC versions of Cory's books
with the right covers before.

And why didn't he think to secure permission for the covers as well? That's an odd oversight.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I hadn't considered the point about the cover licensing, thanks.

But I am not sure it is relevant here; I have seen CC versions of Cory's books
with the right covers before.

And why didn't he think to secure permission for the covers as well? That's an odd oversight.

If you read his download pages for his ebooks, he talks about how he negotiated with his publisher(s) to be able to release his books under a creative commons license, which is pretty unusual for books in print. However, the publisher has bought his book, and also the cover art from the artist, it's up to the publisher and artist to decide whether to put in under a creative commons license, and they didn't choose to.

No cover art. The text of this book is freely copyable, the cover, not so much. The rights to it are controlled by my publisher, so don’t include it with your file.

It's possible people creating the CC edition didn't pay attention, or didn't care.

[crich70]

I think some of his books are up over at Feedbooks

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think some of his books are up over at Feedbooks

It looks like the the editions over at Feedbooks are the Tor editions, not the free Creative Common editions Nate was looking for.