09:31 – Barbara emailed the author Stephen Booth to report a slight problem with one of his ebooks that she’d just read on her Kindle. The copyright page credited the book to Alexander McCall Smith rather than Booth. She got a nice reply from Booth, asking her how she’d managed to get that book for the Kindle since it hadn’t been published in the US. (Steve is a popular mystery author in the UK, but has had trouble getting a US publisher.) Barbara was horrified last night when I told her I’d grabbed it off a torrent site.
So, this morning, I replied to Mr. Booth, explaining that we’d purchased his books when we could, including (in the past) ordering them from UK booksellers, waiting weeks for them to arrive, and often paying more in shipping costs than the cost of the books themselves. I told him that Barbara had asked me to get some of his newer titles as Christmas gifts and that I’d tried hard to buy them. Amazon didn’t have the ebook version, nor even any used copies for sale, let alone new copies. So I grabbed them off a torrent site. I also mentioned that if he still owns the US rights to his titles, he should seriously consider self-pubbing them on Amazon.
Hmm, Switzerland is having vague “banknote technical issues.”
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Central_bank_delays_new_notes.html?cid=32093242
Perhaps due to Euro cash racing into the Swiss franc, and people wanting (untracable) cash bills? The printing presses must be spinning 24/7. Speculation, of course, but would YOU want to be holding cash Euros right now?
I think the Swiss brought that under control by pegging their currency. I would take it at face value, that the latest anti-counterfeit stuff they want to build into the note is not cooperating with high volume production.
And if that is not so, it seems more likely to me that specialized production capacity is overwhelmed with contingency printing by Euro zone countries of just-in-case national currencies.
Our daughter spent a summer in Greece fairly recently, on an island twelve hours by boat from the mainland, and was singularly unimpressed by the general Greek attitudes toward just about everything, including work and money. Of course, coming from her, one needs some large grains of salt, but there it is. Both daughter and Mrs. OFD spent time in Italy last year, daughter for a year, and they had similar impressions in that country, although the regular people were nice.
Things are just different between Us and Them, but I think we may eventually see some Euro chickens coming home to roost anyway.
People shouldn’t be so worked up about piracy, in my opinion. If people want to pirate something, people want to read/watch/hear it. And if people want it, then it’s easy enough to persuade them to buy it: just make it easy to buy, and thank them for paying for you to create other things. Of course there’ll be a few people who leech and pay for nothing, but because the only cost to the author is an opportunity cost (a questionable one at best; most such people would never have bought it), it doesn’t matter.
Practically all music, I’ve bought, I’ve listened to for free first. Because that’s how I find music. All films I’ve bought, I’ve watched for free first. It wasn’t as true with books before — but only because I used to buy books at charity shops. Now I have a Kindle, it’s increasingly true: I’ll start a book, and if I finish it, I’ll try to pay the author. The author just needs to make it easy for me to pay them.
Not sure if this is the right place, but….
You are an astronomer as well as a scientist so I wondered if you had seen the excellent sixty symbols site? http://www.sixtysymbols.com
It was originally from the University of Nottingham and it published a short YouTube video about a wide range of topics from physics, maths and astronomy.
There is now a new initiative by the sixty symbols cameraman Brad called http://www.youtube.com/DeepSkyVideos
which is an attempt to catalogue all the Messier objects each in a short video.
Fascinating stuff
After working his posterior off every summer before, my brother took the summer of 1969 off between senior year college and the extra semester he needed to graduate to travel around Europe. Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Israel, Germany – even a bit of someplace north of Greece like Albania. This was on the cheap – I think his total budget including all travel, food, lodging, and the few things he brought back was under $700. (He lost a lot of weight. We didn’t recognize him at first in the airport when he returned.) He was not impressed with Italy. Venice had had bad floods a few years before, with big spreads in Life about the cleanup and saving the paintings that had been inundated. His impression was that the had simply shoveled out most of the mud and hosed down the paintings. His impression of Greece was different. Both countries were very laid back, which fit with his plans. Greece was even poorer than Italy, but in contrast it was clean. He did not dislike Italy, but overall he enjoyed Greece (and the Greeks) more. Of course that might have been because Greece was easier on his budget.
Travelling throughout Europe is something that a great many European kids do — often right after high school. In fact, I found that most 20-somethings knew much more about the other countries of Europe, than most American kids of the same age, know about various states of the US. It is much safer to do such travelling in Europe, because of the rail system there, and cheap due to ticket subsidies which encourage such exploration. There are also lots of inexpensive hostels aimed at supporting those kids in their quest. Very hard to do similar travelling in the US without the expense of a car, and camping is about the only cheap way to stay places in the US.
Very few American kids ever consider touring Europe, but I suspect your brother found that time fascinating.
eristicist says:
People shouldn’t be so worked up about piracy, in my opinion.
…
Practically all music, I’ve bought, I’ve listened to for free first.
I do exactly the same most of the time: listen first, then buy. Exception is Half-Price Books, where I may buy music and an occasional movie unheard and unseen, but the price is right, and I can bring it back and exchange it, if I don’t like it.
As far as piracy goes, I agree with you, but go even further. Sooner or later the world, technology, and society change in ways that make some things become completely outmoded. Copyrights are one — especially as regards digital. Copyright is now irrelevant to digital, because anyone can copy digital so easily, copyright is unenforceable — except by extreme measures that create 1984 invasions of privacy, spy on people, consider everyone a thief until proven innocent, pass laws and build bureaucracies — like SOPA — that create incredible costs for unproductive work. And the corporates want *us* taxpayers to both pay for the costs of enforcement and suffer the consequences of putting controls on the Internet that are only band-aids, not real solutions. Their fortunes are on the skids because their methods are outmoded in 2012, and they want to go back to 1984. Amazing that so many people continue to support copyrights, even in view of the perfectly obvious.
We need smarter thinkers in Washington, dealing with the problem, instead of implementing the oppressive laws the music, movie, and book industry pay them handsomely to pass. There is life without copyright, but with the people we have in place, we may never get there.
I also take the difficulties with the new Swiss bank notes as innocent. Switzerland replaces its paper currency completely on a regular basis – this will be the third set of bank notes I have seen in 20 years. This is export technology, and the Swiss currency itself is part of the advertising. So they always try to pack in as many snazzy new anti-counterfeiting measures as possible.