SteveHopwood » Wed Jul 30, 2014 11:06 pm wrote:I was sent home tonight with Chris's Kindle with instructions to find fresh content because she has read through everything already on it.
I had several false starts, but eventually found myself at a site with lots of self-published books -
http://www.smashwords.com/ and downloaded lots of stuff from there. Now I am on
http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks downloading the complete works of Jane Austen.
What Chris
really enjoys reading is science fiction and fantasy stuff - fantasy stuff = middle earth a la The Hobbit etc. Any of you guys know of sites where I can download this stuff freely and legally?
Not sure how much of the Jane Austen Chris will actually
read, but hey. A fortnight ago she was likely to use her Kindle to try to operate the tv or call for a nurse; for sure she did not know how to use it as an ereader, or that it was such a beast. Her progress is phenomenal.
More importantly Steve, I want to commend your unflinching dedication to Chris and the willingness you have shown to literally wait hand and foot over her. I am sure it is a silent inspiration to many of us. Someone once said that no one should speak of marriage to another if he cannot see himself as a servant of the proposed partner. Indeed true love is serving another without even knowing that you are doing it. I wish you all the strength, Steve, to continue along these lines and I pray that both of you are blessed with many more years of great companionship.
Now to the more mundane. You wonder if there is a site where you can download stuff "freely and legally" for Chris. Unfortunately, "freely and legally" are words that have become so misunderstood it sometimes borders on the ridiculous.
When Christ fed a thousand with 5 loaves of bread and two fishes, was he putting at an unfair business disadvantage the many food retailers in the neighborhood? When He turned water into wine for the celebrants at a party, was he depriving the government of valuable income tax?
Before the advent of the internet and the emergence of the current fever over piracy and copyright laws, if my friend strolls into my house and finds a book he wanted to read, he took it and off he went to devour it without anyone breathing a word of reproach. It is not very different even today - except if it's done on the internet! Today, if I tell my daughter I downloaded a book for free on the internet she will say it's not fair on the author and yet we exchange copyrighted material between us all the time!
We have allowed ourselves to become overtly fastidious about what constitutes "profit" and what must go down as "loss". But the laws of the Universe as the unerring custodians of its unlimited abundance simply do not work that way. When a fisherman hauls up his net from the sea, he is grateful for the many fish in it. He doesn't start kicking himself for the load of rubbish he also brought up that has replaced the more fish he could have caught. Scientists also agree that you cannot convert one form of energy into another without a degradation of part of it.
So if you wrote a book today and expect to get every penny that should accrue from it, you will soon find it simply does not work that way. The Truth is this: What is yours will not pass you by, regardless of who downloads what, freely or otherwise.
It should never occur to you and I to put up another person's work for sale for our personal profit but if I need some resource or the other and happen to find someone online who is happy to give it to me, I will be hard-pressed to turn him down and instead choose to go pay for it.
If you have not already received offerings of the object of your search from the benevolent members of the forum, and are willing to supply me with more details of exactly what you want for Chris, I will be more than happy to do a search for you. Of course, it will all have to be at the private messaging level - for copyright reasons!!!!!
(hey that's fright there).
