Books You Can't Shut Up About

[Clueless Morgan]

A bad year means I only get through 2 books/week. In a good year I'll top 200 titles between ebooks and audio books. In a great year I'll best a book a day.

Holy shit, do you not have a job??

If you ever see me sitting still in any kind of waiting room, bus terminal, airport, etc... without a book in my hand (or headphones on), please check me for heartbeat and respiration.

Will keep that in mind.

(I will now go around poking random strangers in transport terminals just to make sure they're all alive. Surely this is bound to piss people off... )

Technically, you cannot (legally) loan any e-book unless it is explicitly permitted in the license, and you cannot re-sell them. Your only choices are keep them or delete them. This is one of the greatest bullshit gimmicks to come from the DMCA, the loss of right of first purchase. It infuriates me to no end that I cannot give away a book that I fucking paid for, and (considering the production cost) likely paid a premium for (seriously, 7.99-13.99 for digital versions with almost no production costs), especially when it's a book that I couldn't finish because I didn't like it but I know someone who probably would. It's not like they would even have to jeopardize their precious DRM. All they would have to do is add blu-tooth to the readers and allow transferring the file and the license to another reader. But, that gets in the way of the publisher's... er... I mean the author's (yeah, right) bottom line.

This is a primary reason I dislike purchasing ebooks unless I can get them from the library and only plan on reading them once (which isn't actually a purchase), or unless I can get stupidly good deals on price. I wanted to loan my mom the Henrietta Lacks book but couldn't because loaning wasn't a part of the license for that ebook, but it was so cheap that my mom just bought it herself.

I've been wanting to read Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus, but the prices are outrageous, even the kindle price. For hardcover, it's ~$85, for paperback it's ~$32, and for kindle it's ~$20! WTF?? I could save $15 getting in as an ebook, but I'm still out $20 for a fucking ebook! And it's the type of book that will never be at my library, so I'm really just putting off the purchase until the price (hopefully) drops to something more reasonable.