more PDF books
- From: Eric Eldred <eldred@[redacted]>
- Subject: more PDF books
- Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 18:06:42 -0500
I see there are some more free PDF books online through
an outfit at www.abika.com. They seem to be more
of the poorly-formatted Project Gutenberg type,
but I didn't see any acknowledgement of that source,
nor any links to where they can be found without
the abika.com advertising. [IMHO: It's really a shame
that these people don't do the work themselves
instead of taking the work of others to make money.]
Some of the works can also be found free at Eldritch
Press and at Project Gutenberg sites, but with proper
corrections and proofreading and notes and credit.
Abika apparently is trying to give away bestsellers
(after 6 months on the list) along with advertising.
Not a bad idea, but I don't see that appropriating
the free books of us "bookpeople" helps them in any
way, nor the cause of a free global library. For
example, in "The Art of Kissing" the text includes
many extraneous hyphens and at least one footnote
that goes nowhere. My reaction is pictured at:
http://www.eldritchpress.org/owh/pix/a2044.gif
Abika refers readers to adobe.com to obtain a free
PDF reader (but puts the Adobe site inside a frame).
After downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0, I saw
a page offering free PDF books from Adobe, somewhere
from this URL, but I couldn't refind it directly:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
I tried to download "The Scarlet Letter" to a Windows
98 machine, but got the error message "this file is
corrupted and cannot be downloaded." There are excerpts
from Adobe and Octavo Corp. books; presumably there are
better formatted and made available there as bait for
those who have purchased the GlassBook "eBook" appliance
and use the Adobe "WebBuy" encrypted download process.
(I approve of PDF books, as long as the accessibility
plugin works for blind readers, but I eschew locked-up
books, PDF or otherwise, and I don't approve of stealing
books at all!)
--
"Eric" Eric Eldred Eldritch Press
mailto:Eldred@[redacted]
http://www.eldritchpress.org/EricEldred.vcf