> They only release books that are in the public domain.
Not necessarily. Project Gutenberg does provide some works still under US copyright, such as F. P. Walter’s 1999 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488
The first article I looked up was New Mexico, because I knew, as does anyone familiar with New Mexico history, that it became a state in January 1912 (before which it was a territory). Arizona also became a state, in February. I was surprised to find both described as states of the United States in this 1911 encyclopedia. I suppose the editors just made a confident guess? The last sentence of both articles is, “In June 1910 the President approved an enabling act providing for the admission of Arizona and New Mexico as separate states.”
It’s a healthy constraint but requires careful judgment. Making the installer fit on the floppy is easy if you just leave out a bunch of drivers that exist on the CD and USB installers. It takes discipline to make things fit by trimming bloated code in the kernel and removing vestigial features.
I read about two dozen books a year, the majority as audiobooks, most of the rest as ebooks, and typically one or two in print. I quite like print books, but favor ebooks for the minimal size and weight. I prefer ebooks to audiobooks too, but have far more opportunities to listen to an audiobook than to sit down and read an ebook.
Even though print books are by far the minority of my reading, I still purchase print copies of books I enjoy, for discoverability. I’ve loved reading since childhood because I grew up in a house filled to bursting with my parents’ books. Nobody told me to read Tolkien, or Heinlein, or Verne, or Jack London, or Greek mythology—I simply took those books off the shelf and read them. And when we visited friends and family, I would read books from their shelves too. None of my young relatives have access to my ebook or audiobook history, and I’m not going to hammer my own interests into their heads… but I’m lucky enough to have lots of space, so I keep my bookshelves overflowing.
We honestly need a new term for listening to an audiobook. But the best part of audiobooks is that you can listen while doing other tasks so they free up many hours a day vs sitting and reading.
In my opinion, it’s important to support those publishers and stores that do choose to sell unencumbered media, so that they have some justification to keep doing it.
For public domain books, I use Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive, generally in that order.
For copyrighted books, anywhere as long as it provides DRM‐free EPUB or PDF.
• Humble Bundle introduces a nice sale every few days. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Use on Any Device”. Representative recent purchases: complete Peanuts (42 vols.) for $25, complete Wheel of Time (17 vols.) for $18, complete Malazan (17 vols.) for $18, complete Lone Wolf and Cub (28 vols.) for $18… I check Humble pretty regularly now.
• Google Play. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Content protection: This content is DRM free.”
• Barnes and Noble. Key marker for DRM‐free: “At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.”
Amazon rolled out DRM‐free ebooks (for some books) earlier this year, but at this point they’ve permanently lost my business.
Well, it has something to do with it. In the context of Pixels, carrier‐unlocked phones always allow the bootloader to be unlocked, Verizon‐locked phones never do (see, e.g., https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24254-no-way-to-use-my-veri...), and for other carriers it varies but often requires additional manual fiddling. To quote the GrapheneOS FAQ:
> Devices sold in partnership with specific carriers may be locked by the carrier, which will prevent installing GrapheneOS. This is primarily an issue with US carriers and isn't common elsewhere in the world. To avoid this, either don't buy a carrier device, or make sure it can be unlocked.
Not necessarily. Project Gutenberg does provide some works still under US copyright, such as F. P. Walter’s 1999 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488
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