Wed 22 Jul 2009
Random House is set to release fourteen unpublished shorts by Vonnegut as serial e-books starting end of August this year. As Dave Itzkoff poignantly describes; “In a twist that Kurt Vonnegut, the master satirist, would have appreciated, he continues his career despite the apparent impediments to his productivity.”
Fri 17 Jul 2009
Imagine having thought you bought a book and finding it missing. Scatterbrained ? Lended ? Delusional ? Paranoid ?
Not if you bought the book in e-version off of Amazon. Apparently, e-book sales are reversible according to Amazon. Apparently, although you purchased your copy legally on Amazon and put it on your Kindle, Amazon reserves the right to go onto your Kindle and erase your purchased content, or so they think they do. Of course, only after crediting your sale charge back into your account ! Goodbye, book…
After a move that deleted a range of books from customer’s Kindles, including 1984 by Orwell – How Ironic ! – Amazon sent out a press statement that the company that added the books to the online store did not have the copyright to do so and were in fact uploading illegal content. However, does this give Amazon the right to go onto Kindles and delete ? Apparently not, if you read Amazon’s license agreement and terms of use.
I know that if I buy a Kindle and buy Amazon e-books instead of the traditional dead trees, I will not be able to lend my e-books to my friends and I accept that I can’t resell my purchased digital copies either when I am finished with them. But now I will not even know that I will have them for myself to read ? And I will have to make due with my money back ? Are you adding extra credit for devaluation too ?
It seems like David Pogue is right; “As one of my readers noted, 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.”
Thu 9 Jul 2009
The publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America marks the day that Hemingway is revealed to have been a spy for the KGB. But did he fail at it because Hemingway wanted unidirectional information or was he just not spy material ?
Thu 9 Jul 2009
If you collected all the books that were ever recommended to be read, one would end up with more books than could ever be read in one life-time. So isn’t it nice then that The Second Pass makes an effort to sum up what not to read ? Saves us time !