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Nookd

villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com

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Re: Nookd

#11

Post by wulczer »

bishnu wrote: post #9
goostavos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worries me that one day hard copy books will be viewed as a hobbyists endeavor..

It worries you that people will read more? That people will read more varied things? That authors will get better compensation? That self-publishing will become a much more viable model for literally millions of authors? Man you worry about some weird stuff dude.

Perhaps other things worry him and I don't think you should assume they are the ones you mentioned.

Your comment struck me as snarky and unfair and I have downvoted it and upvoted its parent.

Re: Nookd

#12

Post by aiscott »

bishnu wrote: post #9
goostavos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worries me that one day hard copy books will be viewed as a hobbyists endeavor..

It worries you that people will read more? That people will read more varied things? That authors will get better compensation? That self-publishing will become a much more viable model for literally millions of authors? Man you worry about some weird stuff dude.

Hard-copies endure. Digital, not so much. Checkout Jordan Mechner's recent archaeological expedition to retrieve some source code of his from 25 years ago (Prince of Persia). It was nearly lost, and that is only 25 years!

The digital world is ephemeral.

Re: Nookd

#13

Post by jgfoot »

why-el wrote: post #6

I have the kindle version and it looks fine. And why are they paying for copyright-free material? They can get a nice eBook version from Project Gutenberg.

But remember that War and Peace was not originally written in English, and the quality of translation matters a great deal. With Russian literature especially, the quality of translation varies widely, and some of the best translations into English are still copyrighted. A bad translation might faithfully reproduce the text's literal meaning but badly mangle the literary elegance that made the book so acclaimed in the first place. I'd rather pay $14 for a good translation than spend 1100 pages regretting being cheap.

Re: Nookd

#14

Post by goostavos »

bishnu wrote: post #9
goostavos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worries me that one day hard copy books will be viewed as a hobbyists endeavor..

It worries you that people will read more? That people will read more varied things? That authors will get better compensation? That self-publishing will become a much more viable model for literally millions of authors? Man you worry about some weird stuff dude.

I have literally no idea what you're arguing against, or where you came up with any of your arguments. I did not mention people not reading, nor people not reading varied things, nor compensation, nor self publishing.

So confrontational, geez.

The context of my statement was simply that I enjoy the physical nature of books. I was simply trying to express that if they were gone, or harder to come by than their digital brethren, I would be a little saddened.

Re: Nookd

#15

Post by monatron »

Is the authors implication that in the digital nature of ebooks the ability to manipulate text becomes easier? Regardless of medium isn't this always a possibility? Whether it happens at the publisher and then printed on dead wood or otherwise -- to me it seems like one in the same?

Re: Nookd

#16

Post by CWuestefeld »

eclipxe wrote: post #3

I was an engineer on the Nook team. It isn't possible for the device software to change text of books. Most likely the author or conversion service took the Kindle edition, ran a search and replace for 'Kindle' and there you have it.

Agreed.

This book not being under copyright (afaik), the text is almost certainly from some guy in his garage grabbing Gutenberg Project, etc., books and formatting them for various e-readers.

He probably has some boilerplate stuff like "Formatted for Kindle by John Doe", which gets inserted into the Kindle .mobi version (Kindle being the dominant platform, he does that first). Then he does a search-and-replace, turning "Kindle" into "Nook" in order to create a version appropriate to that platform.

In fact, he could use something like Calibre to do the conversion from .mobi to .epub, which I believe allows for regular expression substitutions as part of the process. That would allow him to get whole shelves of the Gutenberg library in one simple, automated process.

Nothing insidious here. Just somebody being a little bit careless.

Re: Nookd

#17

Post by Splines »

bishnu wrote: post #4

Stupidity like this only hurts the long-term goal of making printed books something only hobbyists are interested in (like vinyl records), but what's the solution? Data integrity regulation from governments? Or will the markets take care of it?

Isn't this the sort of thing digital signatures are for?

Author can sign the text of the book, and publishers can sign the container. I don't know how future-proof this is (and it obviously isn't going to work for something like War and Peace), but it's something that can be done today.

Re: Nookd

#18

Post by excuse-me »

monatron wrote: post #15

Is the authors implication that in the digital nature of ebooks the ability to manipulate text becomes easier? Regardless of medium isn't this always a possibility? Whether it happens at the publisher and then printed on dead wood or otherwise -- to me it seems like one in the same?

It's rather harder for some government/publisher/web search company to modify the hardback copies on my shelf to airbrush Trotsky out of the pictures.

With an eBook all it takes is a click by somebody at Amazon

Re: Nookd

#19

Post by why-el »

jgfoot wrote: post #13
why-el wrote: post #6

I have the kindle version and it looks fine. And why are they paying for copyright-free material? They can get a nice eBook version from Project Gutenberg.

But remember that War and Peace was not originally written in English, and the quality of translation matters a great deal. With Russian literature especially, the quality of translation varies widely, and some of the best translations into English are still copyrighted. A bad translation might faithfully reproduce the text's literal meaning but badly mangle the literary elegance that made the book so acclaimed in th…

I agree, but I think in the case of Tolstoy, or even Dostoevsky, the best translations also have their copyrights expired, since they were written usually few years after the works were published. I read a French version of Anna Karenina (Recommended by the way) once in hard copy, then reread the Gutenberg version, and to me the literary differences were minimal.

Re: Nookd

#20

Post by duaneb »

why-el wrote: post #6

I have the kindle version and it looks fine. And why are they paying for copyright-free material? They can get a nice eBook version from Project Gutenberg.

For translated works, modern, copyrighted works are nearly always better.
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