Post a book you're reading

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It's still an offense if you do it for your own private use, but no one will do anything about it unless it's distributed. It's also an offense to copy your own music from your own CDs to your own computer here in the UK, but no one actually enforces that thankfully.

If I remember right there's a grey area in the law as to whether CD backup or transferring to portable devices for personal purposes is fair use, and it hasn't actually been contested in court. I for one would take deep personal affront if they attempted to enforce a ban on copying for personal use - I am heavily against most* music (/software/film) piracy but would probably take it up just to spite anyone who tried to call personal backups unfair use. ^^



*with the exception of mix tapes, and of some things where I have an active grudge against the artist or author.

Aspie says, "A PDF is not a book!"

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hollows!

It is too. :p Most authors these days compose their work electronically, and there's no sudden transition between "not-book" and "book" when one particular variant of the composition is chosen to be printed.

If I convert a PDF into Kindle format then read the entire book on my Kindle does that not count?

You can also put PDFs on iPhones and iPads then read them in the iBooks app. That counts, because the app has "books" in it's name

Isaac Babel - Collected Stories

Schild's Ladder - was alright. The setting was interesting (experiment gone wrong leads to space going all Ice 9 at half the speed of light, humans flee while attempting to understand it) but I didn't like the story much.
Dragon's Egg - really good. Like Mission of Gravity. First contact with the inhabitants of a neutron star. ^^
The Deep - not good. Not sure if the setting, which was stupid, was supposed to be some kind of denouement, but it was obvious. Too many characters with little to distinguish between them.
The Ophiuchi Hotline - good. Funny and inventive. Didn't think much of the invulnerability of the bad guys, though. They still need planets to live on and the good guys have the means to accelerate large rocks to high speed.
My S*** Life So Far - funny and beyond rude.
Our Vampires, Ourselves - interesting examination of the evolution of the vampire in modern story; pity it predates Buffy and Twiglet.
In Too Deep - Erotic novel - the frame story is alright.
Between the Strokes of Night - Just starting this one, it's interesting. The author's introduction establishes he's trying for very hard sf; no FTL, so the generation ship's voyage appears to have taken fifteen thousand years ("or has it?") to get to Eta Cassiopaea.

The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove (it has warriors riding woolly mammoths in it)

The Gargoyle-Andrew Davidson

shantaram- gregory david roberts

Too epic for me.

I'm currently reading,

Douglas Clegg"The Abandoned" [img][img]http://www.nonstopsmilies.com/msn-emoticons/scary/scary-emoticon-04.gif[/img][/img]

Have to read it for school...

i have been laboring with "green eggs and ham", but it is a bit beyond me.
i have decided that it must be fiction.
fiction is lies, and i lose my interest when i realize i am reading lies.

Recreational fiction is untrue, but it is unreasonable to call it a lie. Most definitions of lying require an intent to deceive. There is no intent to deceive with recreational fiction. The audience is aware from the outset that what is described is untrue. The author is not lying to the audience, but sharing an idea.

I'm on The King in Yellow at the moment. Supposed to have been a major inspiration for HPL.

Last edited by Ambivalence on 16 Jul 2010, 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.