Which they aren't, to begin with.
Random Thoughts XII - Floccinaucinihilipilification
- Thread starter Arakhor
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What are you going to do if you're caught with no electricity or batteries? (don't say that's impossible; all it takes is one good storm and you forgetting to stock up on batteries)Unless it is some collector's edition, I see no point in buying hardbacks.
Tbh now with the internet I barely see a point in buying the printed book
Physical books require neither electricity or batteries. All they require is a light source, provided for free by the Sun. Yes, you can still read physical books on a cloudy day.
Quite often the hardcover will be published a few months before the paperback (like it is now with a lot of games - the Collector's Edition with more content comes out before the Standard Edition without the extra content).
I confess to not being able to wait in a few cases. At least half of my Bova Grand Tour novels are hardcover, though I bought some of them via Amazon Marketplace so they didn't cost as much. And I got one of my Darkover novels on the $2 bargain table at the bookstore. It was a $36 saving.
The fact is that paperbacks are not standard in size. Books from the 1970s and early '80s are taller, even when published by the same company (Star Trek books by Bantam and/or Pocket Books, I'm looking at you!). The Dumarest of Terra novels I have are mostly published in the U.S., by DAW and are a uniform height. But I had to settle for the UK edition for a few of them and they're taller. That means having to find space on one of the shelves that I'd usually put trade paperbacks on, because those UK novels are taller and just won't fit the same shelf the other ones fit.
I do buy some things for the Kindle. For instance, I have most of the Cadfael series on Kindle. They're a heckuva lot cheaper than the physical books, particularly when some were on sale for $2 or $3 (and now Amazon thinks that all I read are murder mysteries so that's what they send in my daily recommendations).
Most of my collection is not, and never will be, available on Kindle. It's either old and not of much interest to modern audiences who have barely (or never) heard of some authors who were fairly well-known a few decades ago, or it's fanfiction in print form. Granted, some of it's online now, but without the artwork and poetry and comics and puzzles that are in the original form. And since these are fan-created works they couldn't be published for Kindle anyway.
The primary use case for physical reading material I have is that 20 minutes or so when they stop you using hand held electronic devices during take off and landing, and I have not had that for a while.
Can I ask why "fan-created works they couldn't be published for Kindle"? I read papers sometimes on the kindle, and it is the graphics that is the problem, it seems it would work very well for fan created text. It has got to be more environmentally friendly than anything involving dead trees.
Copyright issues. Fanfiction cannot be legally sold, though of course the idea behind fanzines in print form is that you're paying for the paper, ink, and staples, not the actual words. Peter David (one of many Star Trek tie-in novelists) told us how, during an early Star Trek convention, the convention Dealer's Room got raided, and all the fanzines they could find were confiscated on grounds of copyright infringement. It's a damn shame, since some of them were probably the only copies in existence.
Most copyright holders at least tolerate fanfiction now, because it's not only free publicity (something George Lucas understood, so he didn't shut down the Star Wars fan projects), but also nigh-impossible to shut it down completely. Sure, it can be deleted from fanfiction sites (Marion Zimmer Bradley's estate has demanded that fanfiction sites not allow any stories based on her novels, but some authors get around it by publishing in other languages that the site owners can't read and so they have no idea how many Portuguese or French-language Darkover stories there actually are on those sites), but how do you police the entire internet? You can't. They did try, though, stupidly assuming everyone would blindly obey. No, I'm not going to destroy the MZB-inspired fanzines I own, nor will I destroy any Darkover fanfiction I've written. I will follow the dictum that "thou shalt not make money from it", of course. And that means not trying to publish it on Kindle and sell it on Amazon. That's illegal.
I read lots of fanfic on my Kindle. In fact, I originally picked it, long ago, because it was the only e-reader available around here at the time that claimed to handle plain txt files. Most of the more recent fanfic I just download as mobi files, though. It isn't "published," exactly, but it is close enough for me. Some stories have artwork, and that shows just fine, too, at least to my eye. Where my Kindle fails is in rendering mathematical equations, where the fonts and symbol placement are strange. You can figure it out, but it isn't nice to read. And pdf files are too tiny for me to read without a magnifying glass.
Project Gutenberg has a lot of older books and stories that I didn't expect them to have thinking they were too new - their Science Fiction bookshelf is filled with authors I recognize (Poul Anderson, Ben Bova , H Beam Piper, Andre Norton, MZBradley, you name it). Some are short stories - it looks like they have a bunch of magazines from the 50s - and some are novels.
Of course, I also have a huge pile of physical books. I prefer physical books, usually, but being able to change the font size for different lighting and being able to stick many books in my pocket makes the Kindle my choice for reading when not at home.
Project Gutenberg has a lot of older books and stories that I didn't expect them to have thinking they were too new - their Science Fiction bookshelf is filled with authors I recognize (Poul Anderson, Ben Bova , H Beam Piper, Andre Norton, MZBradley, you name it). Some are short stories - it looks like they have a bunch of magazines from the 50s - and some are novels.
Of course, I also have a huge pile of physical books. I prefer physical books, usually, but being able to change the font size for different lighting and being able to stick many books in my pocket makes the Kindle my choice for reading when not at home.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
I’m getting gun ads that have undertones of “you look like you have insecurities—mask them with a gun!”
Nah. If I need an artificial boost to my sense of self-worth, I can just do it internally and for free.
Saving the big bucks!
Nah. If I need an artificial boost to my sense of self-worth, I can just do it internally and for free.
Saving the big bucks!
It will take some getting used to...Good job. Now you too have joined the widescreen revolution.
But for graphics work, it is certainly awesome. I can see the difference in how detailed and crispy my own works look now.
One year, our science fiction convention ended up sharing the hotel with a Jehovah's Witness convention.
It was actually rather civil. They gave us odd looks that were meant to convey "we think you're strange and we don't actually want to talk to you". Or maybe it was just that they didn't want to talk to those of us in costume? Possibly someone from our concom told them not to even try to proselytize because we would not take it well?
Whatever. It was still a far more civil weekend than the year we had to share with the Alberta provincial Liberal Party leadership convention.
I believe that is correct, but I reckon they really dislike halloween.
Shhhhh, don't explain the joke!
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, have they done anything with the DOOMSDAY CLOCK recently? I always just picture their editorial board as a bunch of guys in lab coats fighting over a giant clock needle like some kind of Harold Lloyd thing.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Not sure how well it works on Win10/11, but you might be able to force the game to use a lower worldmap-screen resolution by adding the line "VideoMode=1200" to your conquests.ini (which should scale the gamescreens up/down to the equivalent of 900 pixels vertically — though you might also end up with blank/black bars either side of them)Got to say, civIII in 1920x1080 resolution looks rather not good... My cities and all game units are so tiny as they shrunk in the resolution, that it reminds me of civII
Still, love the new detail I can see in images/gfx.
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