Posts by BenWilson
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baby Hippo then?
Ah, the nostalgia. A mate at school had a Bambina, which actually went really well, and we'd drive to school in it (with his gf). Until the handbrake slipped on her mum's driveway and the car smashed through the side of their house. It's no longer in mint condition.
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a true hiphopapotamus will ghettoize it with this and
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That ain't a hippo car. THIS is a hippo car.
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One of my criteria for enjoying a novel is not having payed much for it :-) But you are right, there are others.
Yep, that's the driver (as it is for much lesser readership on Twitter etc.)
etc including 'writing comments on a popular blog'.
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Heh, anyone wearing a 'provocative' unknown American sports team baseball cap would be totally upstaged by that. The chin strap is probably essential.
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Perfect - so does it pull the chicks?
I've never even showed a chick my PDA. It's never seemed appropriate.
Excellent. What sort of PDA and where did you find the orrery?
HP IPAQ. www.download.com. The neat thing about the digital orrery is that its clockwork is so incredibly accurately rendered that it actually ends up looking like the night sky.
says the novels were written by young people & about young people. She is in her late 40s and didnt find them at all engaging.
Now isn't that curious. I find novels by old people that are about old people unengaging. I must be young at heart.
There almost certainly wouldnt have been if professional writers holding copyright & charging for use had been involved.
There would certainly be less readers. But managing to draw a massive audience, even with something free, is not something to sneeze at. Personally I'd be fully stoked if millions of people read my ramblings.
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If you only carry one Plato around, why make it The Republic ? Do you hate Plato that much???
I'd love to see you carrying an orrery around.
I actually do carry a digital orrery around on my PDA. 2, in fact. It's the best orrery ever, because it has it's own lighting, which is needed any time you are looking at the stars.
Try putting Atlas Shrugged on there and impress a certain class of bitter blonde.
I'm trying to think of what kind of person would like that. Anyone who likes Ayn Rand would be shocked by you stealing her work. Everyone else would be shocked that you read it.
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What does "the commercial value of those works are damaged" really mean? Does it mean impossible to derive an income, or impossible to earn a living, or is simply it that the income derived is less than the work might have been worth in the mythical good ol' days?
The same question was striking me too. Are e-books just a new thing, a whole new market, rather than a piece of the old market? Seems that way to me. When I've used them, it's been almost exclusively for public domain. Stuff taken from Project Gutenberg, lots of classics.
These are books which I certainly would not buy, but can't see anything wrong with having a few thousand of on my PDA for any time I'm stuck somewhere and really bored, like waiting rooms, on public transport, etc. This has created something which simply did not exist before, the pocket library of old classics.
I've read a few dozen works that way. Others are just there for reference, things I've already read, like the complete works of Plato, and my other favorite philosophers. Some of these ones are actually not out of copyright and have been 'pilfered' although I do own the print versions (for which the authors did not receive a cent either, since I mostly bought them second-hand).
I'm think that Bertrand Russell would actually approve of me carrying his works with me everywhere.
I doubt that living authors would approve if they weren't proper e-books, though. Fair enough, I guess. For those works, I'm saddled with carrying printouts everywhere, and having massive shelves of them taking up space all around my house and in my garage in boxes, and occasionally losing them or having them stolen. That's the price of copyright, that convenience to readers is a massively secondary concern.
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No, I was the sucker who actually bought and read it hardback. But I like that, since it's finished the collection. I wouldn't mind having a digital copy for my PDA, but I'm in no rush to read those books again.
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scan to txt could work but scanning a 500 page book wouldn't be easier unless they've got automated scanning sorted.
It's how it's usually done for a reason. Like Tim says, you cut the spine off, feed it into a sheet-feed scanner, and there's your scan. Then you run text recognition over it, and bingo, there's your high quality copy. I had to do it myself once when a girlfriend lost the source file to a large essay which she still had hard-copy of - I was amazed how accurate it was, and that was the mid 90s.
I'm not saying that you couldn't convert a file in the way Rob says, but I'm not sold on it being any easier, because it's already really, really easy. The real barrier, so far as I can see, to wholesale ripping to e-books of the printed word is that people don't like to read e-books. It's not very comfortable. They'd rather read a printout, and when it comes to that, they might as well have the actual printout that is legitimate, in a nice bound finished glossy covered actual book.
This is very different to ripped music, because people have liked listening to music coming out of a machine ever since it was possible. That is because recorded music is a performance not a composition. The composition has a much more limited audience, of people who can read music. It's altogether quite a different thing. It may even be much better to those who are trained in music, in the way that a book can be better than a film.
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