Our BetterMost Community > Creative Writer's Corner
The E-Book Files
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: MaineWriter on July 14, 2009, 07:27:34 am ---This was very good. It will make you want to visit China and have Sam Liang cook for you. Too bad Sam is a fictional character!
--- End quote ---
I already want to visit China and have Sam Liang cook for me, and I haven't even read the book!
Thanks for the update, Leslie. I'm sorry to hear about your father.
If you're interested in nonfiction, I've been reading "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" by Winifred Gallagher and can highly recommend it. It's about attention in all its many forms, and how ultimately our lives are made up of the things we pay attention to.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on July 14, 2009, 09:26:40 am ---Thanks for the update, Leslie. I'm sorry to hear about your father.
--- End quote ---
Me, too. :(
MaineWriter:
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. As for my dad -- he's in long-term care, won't be coming home, and the prognosis is poor. We are just taking things one day at a time.
I had a bittersweet father's day. About two years ago, I discovered a website where a man was posting letters from his grandfather who had served in WWI. He was posting the letters in "real-time," ie, he'd post them on the date when they were written, 90 years later. Sometimes several weeks or months would go by before he'd post an update, and as the whole experience was going on, I didn't know if Harry would live.
The website became a bit of a worldwide phenomenon and the man (it was Harry's grandson, Bill) was interviewed in a variety of places, including the BBC. After all this hoopla, he was offered a contract to put the whole thing together as a book. I ordered it ages ago (publication kept getting delayed) intending to give it to my dad. It finally arrived and now, my father is not in any shape to read anything or even look at the pictures. Oh well, I am glad to have it and to have the whole story put together in one place.
Here's the book:
It's for sale at Amazon. And here's a link to the website:
http://wwar1.blogspot.com/
oilgun:
So Orwellian! This really creeped me out for some reason:
Big Brother: Amazon Remotely Deletes 1984 From Kindles
Ever bought a book from Barnes and Noble, then turned around to find it missing from your bookshelf and replaced with a voucher? Bizarre though it may seem, that’s exactly what’s happened to hundreds of owners of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm books, with Amazon remotely deleting copies on user’s Kindles and crediting their accounts.
While this might be understandable if the copies were distributed illegally, the cause here appears to be a publisher which decided it simply didn’t want to offer a Kindle edition any more. Amazon’s response, as posted in the forums:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store
All of which underscores the fact that “buying” a book in the digital realm isn’t the same as “ownership” in the real world. As David Pogue at the NYTimes explains: “apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.”
Or as one of Pogue’s readers describes it, “it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”
source: http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/
(My apologies if this doesn't belong here)
MaineWriter:
Actually, it was determined that the copies were illegal uploads.
L
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version