Reading is a funny thing. If you can do it (and, sadly, not everyone can, but that’s another post for another day), you do it without thinking. All day long, you take in letters forming words forming paragraphs forming stories. When you’re reading, you’re at the car wash, the dentist, work, home, on the subway, standing in line at the grocery store. You pick up a book, glance at the newspaper, visit a website, read a sign. It’s all reading, it’s about context, and there’s no kind of reading that is superior to the other. Sometimes you, the reader, are […]

As we all know, it is BS policy to right wrongs, protect truth, justice, and whatnot, and set people straight when they are confused. Our tasks are humble, but we perform them with dignity. Thus we find ourselves delving deep into the comment section of a recent post by the Publishing Contrarian*. We have, over time, written much about the various Google book initiatives (sample here; there’s more, we promise). First things first, Google is a commercial entity. There is no way that they are undertaking a massive and expensive book scanning project without an eye toward making money. Shareholders

As our faithful readers know, we have been strong supporters of Project Gutenberg — Gutenberg’s mission is to digitize public domain books and make them available for general usage. This volunteer-driven effort still seems to fly under most radars, but we will happily admit to utilizing this service frequently. From July 4 through August 4, 2006, the World eBook Fair will be held, providing access to approximately 300,000 free ebooks. The vast majority of these works are books currently in the public domain; the remainder, in-copyright works, have been included with permission from the copyright holders. Planned as an annual