I took a break and visited my local coffee shop for the first time in a few weeks, and I sat down with a cup and thought I’d read for a bit. I had my tablet with me, and I figured I could grab some quick, free reading from Kindle Unlimited, and I slurped in a sci-fi novel. I wasn’t making a big commitment to something complex, just an hour of light reading, and I figured anything would do.
To paraphrase part of the opening scene in this “book,” in which our intrepid hero has crashed on an alien world…
Fortunately, days on this planet were exactly 24 hours, just like Earth days, but unfortunately, hours were 100 minutes long.
Aaiieeee. My brains curdled in my skull. If I had a soul, it would have withered at this taste of Hell. I closed that sucker up and just finished my coffee while glaring at the wall.
This is a problem with Amazon. They have this program to pay “authors” for generating content for Kindle, but there is absolutely no quality control. There are people churning out multiple schlocky novels a week and dumping them on Kindle, creating a swirling cesspool of terrible writing, and the bad content is overwhelming the work of any sincere authors who are trying to get published, somehow. I’m not going to bother with Kindle Unlimited anymore.
I do have a better alternative. In my region, the Viking Library System provides e-book services through an app called Libby, and I can get good books at home or at the coffeeshop. Availability is significantly more limited that what Amazon offers, but I’m learning that drowning in dreck is not better than having to wait for a book I’ll appreciate to become available.
Also, did you know that public libraries positively impact community health and well-being? Take advantage of them before the Republicans close them all.
I use a bibliographic management system called Zotero which I highly recommend.
Amazon is an excellent source from which to download a reference. I see no reason to use it otherwise.
Viking Library System also has a tie-in to Hoopla – might be worth checking that out. My local library gives me access to their own (Cloud Library) app, Hoopla and Libby. Usually one of them will have the book – availible – that I’m looking for.
I second @rx808 on Hoopla! Libby is great too, but from my experience more audiobooks that are readily available appear on Hoopla. I listen on commutes.
Hoopla has video content too. Not so much on recent blockbuster movies but quirky niche documentary stuff. Last I deep dove the catalog there an excess of stuff akin to ‘Why cardboard is so mesmerizing’ or ‘The social history of athletic socks’. Those aren’t actual offerings, but not that far off from the truth.
I love our local library, and we support it with donations.
Though sometimes they don’t have what I want to read. In early we are going on a trip to the Monterey Bay Area, but with a stop in San Jose to visit the Winchester House. There is a biography Sarah Winchester that debunks many of its myths: https://www.monstertalk.org/258-the-winchester-mystery-house/
Unfortunate “Captive of the Labyrinth” is out of print and not in our library. I found it on Amazon, but got a better deal at Half Price Books, which sent me a copy from Minnesota. So I think I’ll order from the less evil used book store.
Libby is also available in the UK through the local public library’s website. Not as comprehensive as our local library, and a fair bit of dross, but more than enough to get me through a flight or train journey.
My husband will buy books for his Kindle, mostly Star Trek. He keeps getting recommended what amounts to a seriously terrible fanfic, which he keeps telling Amazon to shove up its back end, to no avail. Because it keeps ending up in his recommendations. Even worse? It has tons of glowing reviews…from ChatGPT and other assorted bots!
Thankfully, he can find the legit stuff and sticks to that, but it still annoys the hell out of him.
I get my ebooks from gutenberg.org. You can only get books which are no longer copyrighted, but there’s a lot of those, and they’re all free.
Also with Hoopla is that you can install the app on a Roku so watch stuff on a TV.
I have both Libby and Hoopla on my smartphone and listen over bluetooth while driving. Libby replaced the Overdrive app as it was phased out. Libby is more user friendly than Overdrive was, but may not have as many font options for ebooks. Also Libby ebooks don’t do landscape on my iPhone, but do on my tablet.
I’ve never tried checking a Kindle version book out on Overdrive to deliver to my Kindle app. There may be more versatility with that option? You can deliver such a Kindle version format to a Kindle reader too. Some titles may be available as epub but not Kindle (and perhaps vice versa).
About two decades ago thousands of authors and publishers (including our organizations) battled G00GLE and AMAZ0N over their stealing books, digitizing them and claiming they owned them. AMAZ0N got their URL by threatening and beating up a women’s book store that owned amazon.com. Those criminal thugs now dominate our brain-dead society!
Until the MUMP cult destroys them, here are some sites that offer a wonderful variety of free books for us all:
http://openlibrary.org/
http://gutenberg.org/
http://archive.org/ incredible source of publications, videos, etc.
also has the ‘wayback machine’ for viewing old versions of websites
Welcome to the Dark Ages
“Days on this planet were exactly 24 hours, just like Earth days, but unfortunately, hours were 100 minutes long” would be a fairly good line in a science-fiction spoof (or could serve as the “hook” to introduce a nice discussion on how units of measure are defined); if it was really written with serious intent, that’s just depressing.
OOPS. the URL for http://archive.org now requires: https://archive.org The others work fine.
Ah, but minutes were 36 seconds long! Unfortunately, seconds were an hour long.
Another good source for public domain ebooks is https://standardebooks.org/. (They have better formatting and proofreading than most of the others.)
That sounds like something Garth Marenghi would write.
Libby+Kindle+libraries is my method as well. You have to wait in line for popular books, but if you keep adding new books to your waiting list, eventually you get a steady stream, and the wait doesn’t matter so much.
But it’s a digital file. There’s no good reason why a point of distribution should implement artificial scarcity and make it available to some but not others.
Oh well. That’s why I use Project Gutenberg for books in the public domain, and any of the freely available IPFS web frontends with Tor gateways for the copyrighted ones. Libraries are invaluable for their physical copies, their wireless internet access, and their cozy little reading spaces.
I am familiar with Libby (in New Zealand) because I got my mother a tablet and she used Libby to access books from her library. It’s nice such software exists, and really frustrating to me that it’s so manipulated to invent concepts of artificial scarcity.
S. R. Ranganathan’s Five laws of library science, 1931
Books are for use.
Every person his or her book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
A library is a growing organism
My local library system has reciprocal rights with surrounding communities–and those extend to ebooks as well. For most of them it requires an in-person trip to prove residency and pick up a card, but after that.
Libby search will look at either the current library or all accessible libraries, and will search other libraries to see if hold lines are shorter..
Leave it to Jeff Bezos to wring out as much money as he can from public libraries lending ebooks. It turns out that libraries pay way more for ebooks than for physical books. There are all kinds of other fees Amazon makes libraries pay.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/digital-reading-soars-in-seattle-creating-problems-for-local-libraries
OT
When looking for interesting titles, I stumbled on a film title instead; The Uncanny.
It has Peter Cushing.
And Cats. Lots of Evil Cats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncanny_(film)
THIS is why the Alien did not attack Jones the cat on board the Nostromo. Jones was Connected.
https://toot.cat/@skye/113992648879817109
‘I know we’ve only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it.’
“They have this program to pay “authors” for generating content for Kindle, but there is absolutely no quality control.” If I finish one of my “don’t expect to be published, but I put a lot of effort into them because I wanted to” short stories or novels that would be an amusing place to put them. My work is likely not to everyone’s taste, but I am absolutely certain that it is better than the “100 minute hours” crap that P.Z. found. (I would charge whatever their minimum rate is, I have no expectation of making any serious money off of the writing, so there is no reason that anyone should have to pay serious money to read it. If I could be confident of having a chance at a wide audience I would give it away for free – I wrote it because I wanted to, not because I had dreams of avarice.)
Response to pixbuf — You are correct about the cost. Physical books are far cheaper for libraries than ebooks. My library said they can buy 4-5 copies of a physical book for the price of one on-line book (which they do not own). The libraries are limited in the number of times these books can be checked out, so they have to rebuy them if they are popular with patrons. The physical copies can circulate until they fall apart, or until patrons are no longer interested, at which point the libraries can sell them. There have been attempts to pass laws saying ebook providers can’t treat libraries differently than individual customers – good luck passing them.
Because the Libby selection here in RI is somewhat limited, we pay $75/year to join the SE Michigan Library network (SAILS). This greatly broadens our choices and gives us more holds: best deal in town. Just mentioning this bc I didn’t realize until recently that one could do this. 10x rather give $$$ to another library system than Amazon.
*Massachusetts! Doh!
I have access to the OK (that is, Oklahoma) Virtual Library, which also uses Libby. I have loved this as it has a huge number of books available, though you sometimes have to really dig through what they have. It seems like over half of their sci-fi is romance novels, which just leave me bored. But they do have some gems, and I have found some new good authors to follow.
So, yeah, check and see if your local library is part of a virtual library system like Libby. And have fun with some good reads.
BTW, if you like older books that are no longer under copy write restrictions, check out ManyBooks.net. I have found a lot of wonderful classic sci-fi there.
Important facts worth noting: Hoopla has a spam problem (https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your-public-library-3/) and ebooks in general, possibly just Libby, rip off libraries. I can’t attach images, but per my local library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (https://www.carnegielibrary.org/libby-hoopla-september2024/), the ebook version of The Women by Kristin Hannah, which costs a consumer $14.99, costs the library four times as much — $60.00.
… and has a marginal unit cost of 14 cents, if even that.