The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by DNSB

It may be bullcrap to you but quite a few local publishers depend on it to survive.

Well, people can suck it up and pay the higher local price, but what are they to do for ebooks that are not available locally at all? (JSWolf: Evasion methods are not responsive since they apply equally well to evading higher prices.)

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

(JSWolf: Evasion methods are not responsive since they apply equally well to evading higher prices.)

Thanks to people using it to buy up cheap regional games and selling them using the gift system, Steam changed the rules. Now you can't gift a game to someone if they're in a different country.

People who abuse this stuff ruin it for everyone.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

It may be bullcrap to you but quite a few local publishers depend on it to survive.

No, it's mostly historic USA vs UK/Commonwealth English language. The problem is that the publisher(s) that have the other regions may not sign up the author at all, so book only available at all in one region.

Perhaps you are thinking of booksellers? Which in Ireland traditionally had to buy from UK Wholesale. But some grey-imported to avoid the UK-Irish markup and currency hedging and some in UK and Ireland imported magazines or books that the UK wholesale wouldn't carry. That's a separate issue to Publisher Geographic rights, which large publishers agreed between themselves in a world carve up of English Language market. A kind of cartel. USA Eveready/NCC/UC (now Energiser) and UK Ever Ready / BEREC (now gone) also did it with batteries in 1950s to 1980s.
Consumers suffer and in the case of books, authors also suffer.

Price variation in markets is based on "What the market will bear", not costs and is a completely separate issue to geographical rights, except the book may be available from more than one publisher, which can result in different prices.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Well, people can suck it up and pay the higher local price, but what are they to do for ebooks that are not available locally at all? (JSWolf: Evasion methods are not responsive since they apply equally well to evading higher prices.)

I'm not "traveling" to spend less. I'm "traveling" because of availability.

[Aleron Ives]

I hate it when the paper book doesn't have normal chapters, so the e-book version ends up having giant sections that make navigation much harder, or even worse, the e-book is just one giant chapter that is both impossible to navigate and bogs down performance.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The issue isn't overseas purchases. The issue is SOME books (paper or ebook) that have geographic restrictions. Probably some audio books too.
It will not apply to all books.

I don't think that is true. That might be the cause, but not the effect.

Because some books have geographic restrictions, stores do not allow out of country credit cards as method of payment. But once you get around that, you can buy any book there.

So it's not like you can buy some books and not others. You can either buy anything from the store or nothing.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

I hate it when the paper book doesn't have normal chapters, so the e-book version ends up having giant sections that make navigation much harder, or even worse, the e-book is just one giant chapter that is both impossible to navigate and bogs down performance.

At the end of its life, overly-long sections outright froze up my Aura HD.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DNSB

It may be bullcrap to you but quite a few local publishers depend on it to survive.

I'm not so sure that that is the case with ebooks. I buy books from small publishers (Piccadilly Publishing, Wolfpack Publishing and Valencourt Books) and those publishers tend to sell their stuff worldwide (or at least US/UK).

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

At the end of its life, overly-long sections outright froze up my Aura HD.

Change the words 'Aura HD' to 'interest' and the same thing is true of Moby Dick.

Man, I heard about the long and overly detailed chapters on whaling and cetology and mostly, they weren't too bad. But now that I'm 75% of the way through on chapter 105, I'm like "C'mon Melville! The orchestra is playing. It's time to wrap it up."

Beautifully written though. I'll happily read Melville's short stories and novellas.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'll happily read Melville's short stories and novellas.

"Bartleby" is just stupid.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

I hate it when the paper book doesn't have normal chapters, so the e-book version ends up having giant sections that make navigation much harder, or even worse, the e-book is just one giant chapter that is both impossible to navigate and bogs down performance.

That's bad formatting. Even books with no chapters have scene breaks. I'd make the first few words of that start of scene break paragraph be for a TOC and split the file(s) there.
See many Terry Pratchett Discworld novels and Frank Herbert's Dune (though it simply has unnamed chapter breaks indicated by extracts from writing by Princess Irulan.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Renate

"Bartleby" is just stupid.

That's how I feel about Dick and Jane:

"Run, Jane, run. Run, run, run. Funny, funny, Jane."

So many big words! So many ways to tease out the syntactic meaning that parsing the words leaves me bewildered and confused!!!!!

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Renate

"Bartleby" is just stupid.

I'd ask you to give it a second chance. But I imagine you would prefer not to.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'd ask you to give it a second chance. But I imagine you would prefer not to.

I've read it more than once.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Renate

I've read it more than once.

Bartleby, the Scrivener synopsis:

In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, refusing with the words "I would prefer not to."