Is there somewhere to buy ebooks that supports local book stores? I buy print books from Bookshop.org and my audiobooks from Libro.fm, but don't know where to go for ebooks. I'd like it to be DRM-free so I don't lose it when I'm on "unsupported devices".
Thanks to the magic of the Streisand effect, I just heard about #CarelessPeople - a book by former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams.
Apparently the company is FREAKING OUT and seeking legal ways to stop its promotion. I can see why. This article about it in the Times made my jaw drop: web.archive.org/web/2025031022…
IN OTHER NEWS just as i thought i knew everything i needed to know about the development of fascism ―a very EuroAmerican flavah of authoritarianism― i find myself being schooled by… well… scholars.
am reading "Breve historia de la moda: desde la Edad Media hasta la actualidad" by Giorgio Riello. the book is a product of one of his history courses.
today i columbused a few things about the links between the development of authoritarianism and fashion in Europe…
If you haven't switched from #Goodreads to #TheStoryGraph yet, don't hesitate. I've been using it for a few weeks now, and it's Goodreads before it was enshittified by Amazon (and much more): you can add missing books, if you see problems you can't fix yourself, you report them and a volunteer librarian fixes them within a few days...
As you will know I'm no stranger to typos, so this cartoon goes out to anyone who sent me a massage about a typo in a post (as always thanks for your help, much appreciated) bit also to my Mastodon friend @h4890 who will appreciate this on a Saturday morning.
Amazon will remove the ability to download the ebooks for Kindle at the end of the month. So if you ever close your amazon account, you'll no longer be able to access the books you had bought.
Designed for downloading your Kindle eBooks in a more automated fashion than is typically permitted, this tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you've already purchased. - treetr...
More "enshittification". This time from Amazon. Amazon is pulling a Google, killing off popular services. Evidently, I have until 25th February to download my 708 books that I have purchased from them. After the 25th you can no longer download YOUR books for backup or transfer via USB
Good job I did this 2 years ago eh? Buy the books from elsewhere.
This is fine for those of us who don't buy from Amazon anymore, but if you have a standing library with them, make sure you get it all downloaded so you can break it. It's frustrating because you can't bulk download - I keep finding titles I own but missed grabbing somehow - but you have until Feb 26th to get them all.
Amazon is removing the ability to download purchased Kindle content, which is the only way to read it on my Kobo or elsewhere. What this means is I will no longer be purchasing (“a license to”–ick) any books by the mostly independent authors who exclusively publish there; just cancelled preorders.
My favourite part of this interview? Hmmm...maybe this?
Vikander: What did you learn about craft while writing this, your first book?
De Garis: Craft is a conversation with your materials. It can’t be hurried. It requires attention, patience, and humility. Writing also taught me that craft resists capitalism—not just in theory but in practice. Eighteen months of work for £1250 made that point clearer than any philosophical argument.
I wanted to share with you a conversation that I had with journalist, therapist, broadcaster and editor extraordinaire Svea Vikander. I know Svea well and, like all of us, I am most compelling on any subject when I am comfortable.
Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations
"...court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models."
Hello, I'm new to Mastadon and looking to meet people interested in medieval Silk Road history, especially of women and non-western historical fiction.
To sort of give you an idea of the weird stuff I'm into, here's a post I did about stories written in the Medieval Silk Road that feature women and are available in English:
The Silk Road had men and women of all walks of life. It also was one of history’s most literate eras and places, prior to the modern age. One of the reasons that we know that is from the sto…
‘Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.’
Lord Byron's semi-autobiographical tale in verse The Corsair is published by John Murray in London and sells 10,000 copies on this day and over 25,000 in the first month, going through seven editions. Walter Scott is to say of Byron's poetry: "He beat me out of the field in description of the stronger passions and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart."
All over the world, local libraries offer millions of ebooks and audiobooks. You can borrow them — for free, instantly — with a library card and Libby: the award-winning, much-loved app for libraries.
Many of the locations of Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' can still be seen today. Scrooge's counting house is thought to be in Newman's Court, in the City of London. "The ancient tower of a church" is described, whose "gruff old bell was always slyly peeping down at Scrooge out of a #gothic window." That church has been identified as St Michael's Cornhill, which looms over Newman's Court. In addition, Bob Cratchit heads home via nearby Cornhill, where he "went down a slide" on the ice "at the end of a line of boys, twenty times, in honour of it being Christmas Eve." Scrooge's "usual melancholy tavern" where he takes his "melancholy dinner" is thought to be Simpson's Tavern in nearby Ball Court, which has been trading since 1757. The door knocker which turns into the ghostly head of Jacob Marley was apparently inspired by one in Craven Street, near Charing Cross, where Dickens worked as a boy in a shoe-blacking factory. #Christmas #literature #history #folklore #Yule #books #London
In the wake of SPD shutting down, I started doing roundups on Metafilter of #SmallPress books to support a less corporate reading ecosystem. Time to start posting those here too, dailyish! 💙📚 Or you can go to my Bookshop list (affiliate link): bookshop.org/lists/small-press… #bookstodon #books
I never understood the appeal of vampires and such being sexy. it's the same with cat-girls. Can someone explain the appeal? I'm curious. #Erotica #Sex #Books
I remember reaching out to a bunch of friends to put together this six year-old article about books for getting started with occult/magical practices. Lots of good stuff on this list, too. #books #occult #magic #morebooksarnemancy.com/articles/getting…
Review: The Odyssey is a story about a homicidal maniac (Odysseus) who refuses to ask for directions. This tragic flaw, shared by many men, leads his crew to disaster. Some are eaten by monsters, some are eaten by their crew-mates, and some finally get fed up with this cruise from hell (literally at one point), and take a flight home.
When Odysseus returns home, he is shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that after a 20-year absence, his wife is entertaining the possibility of remarrying.
I'm rereading Aeronaut's Windlass, the first book in the Cinder Spires series by Jim Butcher, in preparation to read the short novella that comes after it and the second book that was released last year. I'd forgotten how funny it is, especially when the cat comes into play.
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!?
Well, now I have issues with books. Goodbye, auto advance mode for braille displays. Anyone? Suggestions? Is there an actual app that will accept Epub as format of books? And yes, I cheat by turning on auto advance for braille displays, but this is bothersome, open to suggestions, if the app is easy to import books into or something, or has sync with iCloud. Thanks! #braille #books #reading
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine) John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold (Steinbeck's first novel) Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story Patrick Hamilton, Rope
"What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow. What are brief? today and tomorrow. What are frail? spring blossoms and youth. What are deep? the ocean and truth."
Christina Rossetti, who died #OTD in 1894, was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
"Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC."
"Those publishers ... will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book." #canada #cdnpoli #books
I really enjoy adding a book to my TBR pile. Then reading six other books, forgetting every detail of why I added that first book, and picking it up again weeks or months later. I used to hate knowing a surprise existed without knowing the surprise, and it took me a long time to grow out of that behaviour, for some reason. Now, I'm giving my future self an intentional surprise. I'm letting an author tell me a story, and I don't know where it will lead yet, but I trust it will be somewhere good. #books #bookstodon #bookworm #reading
J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
Some of his notable poetry collections include "Új versek" (New Poems, 1906), "A Holnap" (Tomorrow, 1908), and "A halottak élén" (At the Head of the Dead, 1918).
Author of sci-fi without the pew-pewSi (she/her) is a Canadian misanthrope who lives in London. She shares her home with her partner and an assortment of waifs and strays.
My website hosting came up for renewal, so I’ve taken the decision to take the site down. Visitor traffic doesn’t warrant the cost of keeping it going, and all my books are on Amazon anyway. But you can expect to see more posts here promoting my books. If you like #Historical fiction, please do take a look at them. I’ve written stories set in Roman times, as well as a few on WW1 aviation. Do check out the Amazon reviews. #Books #Novels
Provides you with dozens of recipes to help you build common components on the web, such as navigation, forms, filters, tables, and dialogs, in an accessible manner.
This is an interesting article by a writer who finds that reading a book aloud helps him with comprehension. In fact, he says reading out loud was the custom for most of history, to the point that Augustine wrote about a fellow monk who read silently and thought it was a strange habit:
Background from IA: "We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of #libraries to own, lend, and preserve books." blog.archive.org/2024/09/04/in…
The Fediverse's social reading platform BookWyrm lets you import your account data from Goodreads, LibraryThing, StoryGraph, OpenLibrary or Calibre. There are step by step instructions for how to do this here:
