MobileRead Promoted in Article on usatoday.com

[Sapphire]

Downloadable content can be yours, temporarily, at the library

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...#uslPageReturn

[DiapDealer]

Dang, I wish someone would have told me reporters were coming. I would have combed my hair... and put on some pants.

[GA Russell]

Hooray! And now, the deluge!

[Worldwalker]

Um ... nobody saw me do that, right?

Or that?

Okay, good....

I hope they come here. Especially Sophlady, who needs a good whack from my clue-by-four. I almost signed up for the site just to answer her, but USA Today asks entirely too many intrusive questions (why should they know things like my sex, let alone my job title???). But this one made me steam:

Project Gutenberg is completely separate and becoming obsolete. That is because all the major ebook sellers offer the same books free. The versions downloaded from Amazon, iBooks, Copia, etc., are usually better - digitized instead of scanned, and with cover art.

What. The. Hey?

Project Gutenberg is less obsolete now than it ever has been. I bought my ebook reader specifically to read PG. With the rise of ebook readers, netbooks, and tablets, it's gone from a niche site that a few weirdos who like to read on their computer or their PDA use to downright mainstream.

Unlike "the major ebook sellers" its books are available to anyone, in any country, on any platform, with no DRM, no platform lock-in, no geographic restrictions, and no lending restrictions. And unlike "the major ebook sellers" those books are free -- which is not the case for the majority of them from the majority of bookstores. Stores don't make money from giving away books.

And what does "digitized instead of scanned" mean? Is she trying to say that someone at Amazon slowly typed in every word of, say, Tom Sawyer? Pardon me while I laugh myself sick. Every pbook that is turned into an ebook is scanned. And therefore, by definition, digitized. I'm seriously not sure what she's talking about there.

I do know, though, that the PG ebooks are very, very carefully proofread by the Distributed Proofreading project, and come up almost as good as the even more exact, more carefully and lovingly proofread books that can be found here on MobileRead. Unless the stores, or the people selling through them, have just copied books from PG and stripped off the identifying text (which happens a lot), their books are no better, and often worse (sometimes much worse ... raw, un-OCR'd scans, anyone?) than PG's ebooks. And I would not pay extra for the "covers" (generally stock with the titles unevenly capitalized) slapped across most ebooks by the bookstores and the people who read "make a fortune selling free PD ebooks"; the ones that PG (or ManyBooks, Feedbooks, or MobileRead) has are at least that good, and often better, especially if the original cover is legal. Munsey's ... well, let's leave out the issue of their covers entirely. But, thankfully, since (unlike the books from "the major sellers") their books are free of DRM, I can install my own covers, which are anything but that old copy of Munsey's magazine they use.

Oh ... I hope nobody saw that, either. Um, I think I'd better go clean up.

[neilmarr]

PLEASE say nothing against PG.! It's admirable. But it is true that some classics and public domains (not as many, of course) are better formatted when acquired from other sources ... here at MR for instance. But a book's its content, when all's said and done, and should not be judged on how pretty the words might display on a page or screen. Neil

[ATDrake]

WTF is Sophlady on about? Did she not notice that practically all of Amazon's "free" public domain books are cribbed directly from PG texts and don't even bother to remove the PG boilerplate text when they do so?

Not to mention, PG doesn't dump raw scanned texts online, but is based around taking the time to carefully transcribe them and has a lot more stuff than are likely to even show up at Amazon or elsewhere. Good luck finding someone willing to supply to ebookstores a "digitized instead of scanned, and with cover art" version of Contagious Abortion of Cows by Ward J. MacNeal.

Maybe she has the Internet Archive or Google Books in mind, if she's bothered to even find out that they exist in the first place. That's an appalling degree of ignorance passing itself off as authoritative knowledge.

Ah well, anyone following the link here to MR will soon learn better.

[jbcohen]

I really wish that USA Today had included an exmplination of the technology and how to work with the technology. At least in my opinion the electronic book industry is still too primitive to be simple and easy to use. There are too many compatibility issues that need to be understood and ironed out before one can truly use the electronic book services. I had to do quite a bit of reading on these forums in order to uderstand how to use the technology and how to get hte books where I needed them to be.