Subject: Re: archive...
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Tue Jul 10 2001 - 23:21:23 GMT
>How much of JDS' work is in electronic form, either legit or not?
>And where would one lurk to find it? Would love to have it all on my
>Palm pilot.
None of it is in LEGITIMATE electronic form. Any collection of the
"underpublished" stories -- on paper, in ZIP files, as Adobe Acrobat
Reader files -- is pirated. Salinger's agents pretty energetically
search out and send scary "cease and desist" letters to people who
put the stories up for downloading. Just as a note of warning: the
Ober people read this list and watch for piracy to rear its head.
I've NEVER seen the stories in Palm format. I have to admit, as a
reader, that it would be neat to be able to fire up my Palm and jump
right into the collection of the 22 stories. I have the equivalent
of a small bookshelf of public-domain works (e.g., all of Sherlock
Holmes, some Thoreau, some Melville, all of Dickinson) on my Palm,
and if I'm stuck on a bus, I get a kick out of being able to open it
up and read from an appliance that's not much larger than the
notebook I carry in my jacket pocket.
On a related note, over the weekend I logged onto Amazon.com and
downloaded (for about $15) Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, and Ulysses, all in Microsoft Reader format. It is
amazing. The technology uses an innovation called "Clear Type,"
which makes the letter rendering especially crisp and clear, and on
top of that, the contents are fully indexed down to the word; it's
searchable; and (the killer feature, in my opinion) it can be
annotated. The annotations are kept as a separate file that is
married to the original, so when you open the book you get your
annotations, but it leaves the original book intact and untouched, so
if a different person on the same machine opens the file, that person
will get a clean slate and can make his own annotations that have no
connection to yours. (I have no idea of what the licensing issues
are in terms of sharing the text on the same machine among multiple
users, but that's not an issue with me, because I'm the only user of
the computer.)
The only drawback to the Microsoft Reader approach, in my opinion, is
that it works only on a PC, not a Mac, and Microsoft has said it has
no plans to port the application to the Mac platform. I'm a diehard
Mac user, and when I use the PC it's only to get access to programs
like this, which only live on the PC; or to interoperate with PC
users with software that doesn't make nice on both platforms.
But it's a great application of technology to books, and it brings me
no end of delight....
Back to JDS: please exercise good common sense with respect to fair
play when you dig out the underpublished stories, and remember that
Salinger's representatives are active about protecting his copyright.
(Legally, they HAVE to be so aggressive, because if they are lax in
protecting his work, he could lose protection under U.S. law, which
requires him to vigorously defend his copyrighted work, or risk
losing his copyright protection.)
--tim
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