An Eclectic Mind

And why I might buy one anyway.

As an avid reader, I’ve been attracted to the idea of an ebook reader for years. But until this past autumn, I haven’t really found one I thought I’d actively use.

Before that were offerings from Sony, which seemed to fall far short of what I thought was a good design. The blinking page turns would drive me batty, since I knew I could go through an average page in 10-20 seconds. (Have I mentioned that I read very fast?)

Kindle came out and lots of people loved it, but I was turned off by Amazon.com’s aggressive marketing, limited format support, and high book prices. (Like many other book buyers, I don’t feel that an ebook’s cost should be anywhere near the cost of its printed version.) And when Amazon snatched purchased books off of Kindles without warning, I started wondering what other kind of access Amazon had and whether it would use it.

Enter, the Nook

Then Barnes and Noble introduced its Nook. Or at least it announced it. It seemed more in line with what I was looking for in size, cost (for the unit and books), features, and flexibility. I visited B&N stores regularly to get my hands on one and give it a try. No joy there. Even after November 30, when the units were supposed to be available for purchase, I could not seem to find one. And I certainly wasn’t going to buy one until I either read a lot of reviews about it or had some quality time with a demo unit. I did see a few reviews and they were, for the most part, positive. But I still wasn’t prepared to buy one until I could walk away from the store with it.

Christmas came. My husband decided to buy one for me. Of course, he couldn’t get his hands on one, either. But he ordered one online. They said it would ship in January. He asked for some kind of card he could give me on Christmas Day, in its place. They charged him $4 for a card that looked like a nook. And that’s what I opened on Christmas Day.

A few days later, he checked with B&N again to see when the Nook would arrive. They projected the end of January.

FAIL

An Apple Tablet?

This week, the Apple Tablet rumors have been in full swing. I’ve been wanting an Apple Tablet — or at least thinking I wanted an Apple Tablet; more on that in a moment — since last spring. I actually put off the purchase of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, hoping a Mac netbook would become available before then. Apple kept insisting they weren’t going to develop a netbook. I caved and bought the 13-inch MacBook Pro to replace a 15-inch MacBook Pro and the 12-inch PowerBook before it. (I still have both of those; anyone want to buy one?)

So here I sit, on January 6, expecting a Nook right around the same time that Apple might announce something infinitely better.

Or not.

The way I see it, Apple could do one of two things:

• It could announce an Apple Tablet that basically reinvents ebook readers and tablet computers at the same time. Kind of like what the iPod did for MP3 players years ago. Something that would blow all the existing options out of the water. Something not only I’d want, but everyone with a need (or desire) for mobile computing or an ebook reader would want.
• It could announce an Apple Tablet that, although attractive in its design and interface, falls short of what I need or want as an ebook reader or tablet computer. Or marry the device to a partner that I can’t do business with. This is what I thought about the iPhone and AT&T. I might have gone with the iPhone if I could choose my own carrier — without jailbreaking — but the AT&T partnership was a deal breaker for me.

An iPhone-like Situation

Indeed, my situation today has a lot in common with the iPhone announcement and release. Back then, I was in the market for my first smartphone. My Motorola flip phone was four years old (at least) and I wanted to tap into the basic computing power of a smart phone to store contact information, calendar events, and simple applications that would help me as a pilot (weather, flight planning, etc.). It was vital that the phone be able to communicate with my Macs to exchange information. When the iPhone came out, it looked like a dream come true.

Yet just days before people started lining up to buy iPhones, I bought my Palm Treo 700p. At the time, it was a better decision for me. Two years later, I updated to a Blackberry Storm. Again, it was better for me.

You see, unlike so many other people, I don’t buy the hot new gadget just because it’s a hot new gadget. I buy it because it meets my needs. The iPhone doesn’t meet my needs. I need a carrier with coverage in remote places. Verizon is that carrier. (Hell, AT&T can’t even get a good signal at my house.) I’m not interested in dropping $1.99 every few days or weeks on cool apps I don’t need or playing games on my phone. I’m not interested in being able to join wi-fi networks — in the very remote places I go, I consider myself lucky to have a cell signal at all. I need “tethering” to get my computer on the Internet via my cell phone’s Internet connection. The Treo and the Storm both support that through Verizon; I just learned that the iPhone still does not via AT&T. I’m not interested in jailbreaking a phone to add features that the maker and carrier don’t want me to have. I want a fully functioning, fully supported smartphone that does exactly what I need it to do, right out of the box. That’s why I don’t have an iPhone.

Now before you iPhone lovers get your panties in a bunch, just remember that I’m talking about my needs and wants. Not yours. Yes, your iPhone is very cool. Yes, I wish it met my needs. But although it might be perfect for you, it simply doesn’t meet my needs. I made my decision. Don’t waste your time and mine blasting me in Comments because I haven’t drunk the iPhone Kool-Aid and sacrificed my needs so I can be cool, too.

My Point

And that brings up one of two points in this post:

• Barnes & Noble failed when it introduced its Nook right before Christmas and didn’t have enough units on hand to sell to customers who wanted them. That failure was only made worse when the Apple Tablet rumors starting churning up again. Why would anyone buy now and wait until January month-end for a device when Apple, which is known for innovative, game-changing designs, could announce a competing product around the same time? Hell, if the Apple Tablet is the product I hope it is, I’d buy one even if I already had a Nook. But the Nook hasn’t arrived and B&N has just lost a sale.
• Although I’m huge Apple fan who has been using Macs since 1989, writing about them since 1990, and, indeed, earning a living as someone who teaches others about Apple products and software, I won’t buy an Apple Tablet if it doesn’t meet my needs. (Maybe it’s because I’d be buying it for me, and not to impress others with it. ) I’d like to think that there are other people like me who feel the same way. Don’t buy it just because it has an Apple logo on it. Buy it because it’s the best product to meet your needs.

It’s because I’m willing to wait and see what might be available soon that I’m in a good position to get what I want instead of compromising on features. I like immediate gratification as much as the next geek, but after buying so many gadgets over the years — heck, I still have a Newton MessagePad on the shelf! — I’ve learned not to rush out and buy what might be the next great thing. I’m willing to wait, at least until April or May, to make my ebook reader purchase.

Whether it’s an Apple Tablet or a Nook or something else that materializes between now and then remains to be seen.

But one thing’s for certain: it will be the right purchase decision for me.

Call Me a Geek, In Books books, computers, ebooks, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Mac OS, reading

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And how you can help.

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to start downsizing and simplifying my life. I want to spend more of the year traveling, experiencing more of what this whole country has to offer — rather than what’s around me in Wickenburg or Phoenix. I’m hoping that my travels will help me find the place I want to retire to. I know that neither Wickenburg nor Phoenix is that place.

I’ve been in my Wickenburg home for 12 years and have accumulated at least 12 years worth of “stuff.” Since I’m addicted to books, a lot of that stuff is books. I have a library of about 500 books spread out over three rooms and lots of shelves. I’ve read many — but sadly, not all — of these books. They cover many of the topics that interest me now — and have interested me over the past 20 or more years. Not much of it is fiction — I tend to use libraries for that these days, since I usually don’t read a novel more than once.

A lot of my library consists of reference books: books I consult — or think I need to consult — for my work or hobbies. For example, I have at least 75 books about writing and at least 40 about flying helicopters. I have books about horses and parrots and aquarium fish — the pets I’ve owned over the years. (We don’t need a book about dogs; we’ve learned through experience.) I have books about Web design and software programs and operating systems. I have books about business and philosophy. I have travel books about places all over the U.S., South America, Europe, and even Australia.

And, of course, I have the coffee table books I’ve gotten as gifts, most of which are beautiful but poor matches for my interests.

Thinning out my library seemed a good place to start thinning out my stuff. So I did what I usually do when I want to sell a book — I listed a bunch of them on Amazon.com.

Listing a book for sale on Amazon.com is very easy — as long as you have the ISBN. Just enter the ISBN in a form field and Amazon displays the book. You indicate the book’s condition, set a price, and choose shipping options. Amazon then lists it as another “Buying Choice” in the right column of the page where the book is listed and described.

A long time ago, I bought a used book on Amazon.com through a “marketplace” seller. The book was described as used in “Used – Very Good” condition. But when the book arrived, I found it full of underlining. I wigged out and contacted the seller. They refunded the payment; I returned the book. The whole experience left a sour taste in my mouth that took several years to wear off.

Since then, however, I’ve bought other books through marketplace sellers. The first after that bad experience was Drood, a novel. The book is enormous — 784 pages — and Amazon was selling it for well over $20 at the time. But someone else was selling it for $8 in “Used – Like New” condition. I took a gamble. The book, when it arrived, was indeed like new. I’ve since bought a few other books this way.

The drawback to buying from Amazon.com Marketplace sellers is that the books never qualify for “Free Super Saver Shipping.” You have to pay shipping for each book you buy. But if you’re saving $10 on a book, you’re still ahead if you spend another $3.99 for shipping.

Anyway, I currently have 57 books listed on Amazon.com’s Marketplace for sale. All of the books are in new or excellent condition — I treat my books very kindly. (The idea of writing in a book appalls me, although I know it’s common.) I’ve priced them to sell, meaning they’re usually the lowest price for a new or used book. The main goal is to unload them without cost — not to make a fortune selling books.

I’ve only gone though about 10% of my library, so many more will be listed over the coming weeks. I expect to list at least 400 books between now and March month-end.

Help me reduce my stuff — check out the list of books and if you want one, buy it from Flying M Productions.

Days in My Life, In Books books, reading, travel

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But boatloads of religious and mystical crap are?

Sir Arthur C. Clarke died in 2008. He was an award-winning science fiction author — and that’s an incredible understatement given the number of awards and his impact not only on science fiction but science itself. Most people know him for his novel 2001: A Space Oddyssey, which was made into a ground-breaking science fiction film in 1969.

On the day he died, Twitter was filled with commentary about his work. But it wasn’t 2001 that came up again and again. It was his 1953 book, Childhood’s End.

From Clarke’s Wikipedia entry:

Many of Clarke’s later works feature a technologically advanced but still-prejudiced mankind being confronted by a superior alien intelligence. In the cases of The City and the Stars (and its original version, Against the Fall of Night), Childhood’s End, and the 2001 series, this encounter produces a conceptual breakthrough that accelerates humanity into the next stage of its evolution. In Clarke’s authorized biography, Neil McAleer writes that: “many readers and critics still consider [Childhood's End] Arthur C. Clarke’s best novel.”

Indeed, Childhood’s End is so outstanding among Clarke’s work that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

I’m pretty sure I read the book, but I honestly don’t remember it. My science fiction reading was done mostly in my late teens and I consumed a lot of Clarke’s work. Rendezvous with Rama remains my favorite of his books. But when so many people on Twitter were raving about Childhood’s End, I made a mental note to track it down and read it (again).

Time passed. I’ve halted all book buying in an effort to stem the tide of incoming clutter at my home. I wanted to read something other than the books on my reading pile. Something to escape the real world. And I remembered Childhood’s End.

So I visited Wickenburg’s Public Library to pick up a copy.

And was surprised to learn that they didn’t have it.

Not that it was simply out on loan. They just didn’t have the book in the library.

They had 2001, 2010, 2061, and even 3001 (which I didn’t even know existed). And there was another Clarke title on the shelf — although it wasn’t listed in the computerized card catalog. But no Childhood’s End — which many consider his best work. No Rama, either.

I was disappointed, but not terribly surprised. They didn’t have Carl Sagan’s Contact, either. That book had been made into a movie starring Jody Foster. You’d expect it to be present on the shelves, but … well, I’ll get to my reason why in a moment.

I looked around the library for what they did have. The New Arrivals section bore little resemblance to the New Arrivals tables at the Barnes and Noble I visit near our Phoenix place. Those were new, noteworthy books. I only found one of them in Wickenburg: The Murder of King Tut by James Patterson. I grabbed it. There was very little fiction and much of the fiction they did have had Christian crosses on the binding. That’s Wickenburg’s way of noting that a book is Christian literature. They do the same thing with mysteries and science fiction, but the New Arrivals area had far more crosses on bindings than other symbols.

I wandered back to the paranormal section of the nonfiction shelves, hoping to find some of the books I’d seen listed on various skeptics sites. To their credit, they had Flim Flam! by James Randi — an excellent read that I reviewed here. But that was the only title for skeptics. Meanwhile, they had over two dozen titles by Sylvia Browne. And the health section was stuffed with books about unproven remedies and health regimens.

I wandered back toward fiction and started actually looking at the bindings. That’s when I started noticing that there was an unusually high percentage of books with that Christian cross on it. Christian fiction. The library was full of it.

But it only had four books by Arthur C. Clarke.

I looked around. Other than a young woman surfing the net on her MacBook Pro, I was the youngest patron in the place. I’m in my 40s. The rest of the patrons were 60+.

I went to the desk and asked if the library could get books from other libraries in Maricopa County. I was told no, the library is run by the Town of Wickenburg and is separate.

I asked why the library didn’t become part of the Maricopa County library system. I was told that then Wickenburg would be told what books it had to carry.

“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” I said.

“Yes, it would,” the librarian replied. “We know what our patrons want to read.”

They do? Sure fooled me.

I’m a patron, but I don’t want to read any of the Christian fiction and pro pseudoscience crap that fills the shelves. I want to read bestsellers, the classics, and award-winning fiction. I want to read non-fiction that educates me about science and philosophy and opens my mind to critical thinking.

Clearly, I’m not going to get any of that at Wickenburg Library.

And that brings me back to my suspicions on why Contact and more books by Arthur C. Clarke and other thought-provoking authors are not in the library: the themes of these books have the audacity to suggest that there might not be a God. That the meaning of life might be something beyond what’s in the Bible. That science and a reality based on known facts are important to our survival as a species or civilization, more important than man’s religions.

Censorship at our local library? I’m convinced. Why else would they refuse to be a part of one of the biggest library systems in the state?

And my tax dollars are paying for this?

When I asked whether I could get a Maricopa County library card, the librarian confirmed that I could — but not there. “Aguila has a branch,” she told me.

Aguila is a farming community 25 miles west of Wickenburg. I’d estimate that at least 25% of the population doesn’t even speak English. Most people live in trailer homes. It’s a sad, depressed community with nothing much to offer. The possibility that it might have a better library than Wickenburg boggles my mind.

“If you get a Maricopa County library card, it’ll cost us money,” the librarian said. It was almost as if she were asking me not to, just to save them a few bucks.

What she didn’t realize was that she gave me even more reason to get one. I think my husband will have to get one, too.

Fortunately, there’s a branch of the Maricopa County Public Library walking distance from our Phoenix place. I guess I’ll be getting my reading materials there, on Wickenburg’s dime.

Deep Thoughts, In Books atheism, books, censorship, reading, religion

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I guess a best-selling author doesn’t need to check his facts.

A few weeks ago, I forced myself to slog through Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I’m trying really hard to understand why people like this guy’s work. He’s a gawdawful writer. Have we become a nation of illiterates?

As a helicopter pilot, I’m really sensitive to errors about helicopters that appear in fiction. The Lost Symbol was chock full of them. Apparently, it’s too much to ask Dan Brown to take a peek at Wikipedia or talk to a helicopter pilot when writing passages that concern helicopters. It makes me wonder what other “facts” he got wrong.

This bugged me so much at the time that I wrote a post title “Facts in Fiction,” where I discuss the failure of novelists to check the real-life components of their fictional worlds. I wanted to include a discussion of Brown’s failures in that post, but didn’t have time to complete it. Instead, I’ll cover them here.

These are the passages that bugged me most:

Without warning, Omar felt a deafening vibration all around him, as if a tractor trailer were about to collide with his cab. He looked up, but the street was deserted. The noise increased, and suddenly a sleek black helicopter dropped down out of the night and landed hard in the middle of the plaza map.

Deafening vibration? We get it: helicopters are loud. But do they deafen with their vibrations?

Public domain image of UH-60L by SSGT Suzanne M. Jenkins, USAF from Wikipedia.

The “sleek black helicopter” he’s describing is a “Modified Sikorsky UH-60,” which is basically a Black Hawk. I’m not sure what kind of modifications Brown is talking about — there are many versions of this helicopter. I’m also not sure I’d use the adjective “sleek.”

But what bothers me more is how it “dropped down out of the night and landed hard” — if it “dropped out of the night,” it would indeed “land hard.” This poor helicopter “landed hard” three times in the book. I think the CIA should consider getting a new pilot.

CIA field agent Turner Simkins was perched on the strut of the Sikorsky helicopter as it touched down on the frosty grass. He leaped off, joined by his men, and immediately waved the chopper back up into the air to keep an eye on all the exits.

“Perched on the strut,” huh? Not perched on a skid? Oh, yeah, that’s right: A Black Hawk doesn’t have skids. It has wheels. If someone can tell me where a Black Hawk’s perchable strut is, please do.

High above the National Cathedral, the CIA pilot locked the helicopter in auto-hover mode and surveyed the perimeter of the building and the grounds. No movement. His thermal imaging couldn’t penetrate the cathedral stone, and so he couldn’t tell what the team was doing inside, but if anyone tried to slip out, the thermal would pick it up.

I honestly don’t know if there’s an auto pilot in a Black Hawk or whether it has an “auto-hover mode.” I suppose I could research this and find out. But I do know that there’s no way in hell that a CIA Black Hawk pilot (if there is such a thing) would be responsible for flying a helicopter and doing overhead surveillance using thermal imaging at the same time. Pilots fly, on-board observers observe.

As they rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, Katherine stopped short and pointed into a sitting room across the hall. Through the bay window, Langdon could see a sleek black helicopter sitting silent on the lawn. A lone pilot stood beside it, facing away from them and talking on his radio. There was also a black Escalade with tinted windows parked nearby.

Hello? Mr. Brown? A Black Hawk has a crew of two pilots. The original Black Hawk had a crew of four pilots. Yet the book consistently uses the word pilot — a singular noun — when referring to the person flying the helicopter. I guess it’s easier to write one character than two.

The modified UH-60 skimmed in low over the expansive rooftops of Kalorama Heights, thundering toward the coordinates given to them by the support team. Agent Simkins was the first to spot the black Escalade parked haphazardly on a lawn in front of one of the mansions. The driveway gate was closed, and the house was dark and quiet.

Sato gave the signal to touch down.

The aircraft landed hard on the front lawn amid several other vehicles . . . one of them a security sedan with a bubble light on top.

Google Maps shows Kalorama Heights to be a densely populated area of Washington, D.C. filled primarily with embassies. This is an especially poor location for the bad guy’s lair:

Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk dimensions public domain line drawing from Wikipedia.

• An area filled with embassies is likely to have very, very tight security. It’s unlikely that the events Brown reports could happen at a “mansion” there without anyone noticing and calling the police.
• Properties are not large — not in relation to the buildings on them. The fronts of buildings are generally right up on the street. It would be a stretch to park multiple vehicles on a lawn.
• The area is heavily vegetated with lots of tall trees. This makes me wonder how a helicopter that’s almost 65 feet long and has a rotor diameter of nearly 54 feet can land on a lawn full of parked cars in this area.

So we’ve got a big helicopter and some loud activity happening in a densely populated, heavily treed embassy area of Washington, D.C.

Sato moved the group toward the dining room. Outside, the helicopter was warming up, its blades thundering louder and louder.

Warming up is a function of the engine. The blade sound would not be different. Spinning up is a function of the blades. In either case, the sound of the blades would not get louder. If the helicopter were spinning up, the sound of the blades — the rhythm of the blades — would get faster.

Sato could hear the whine of the helicopter blades at full pitch.

Pitch is a poor choice of words here. “Helicopter blades at full pitch” literally means the collective is full up. The helicopter should be flying, not on the ground (as it is in this passage). Full speed — meaning that they’re spinning at 100% RPM — is probably what Brown meant here.

Langdon felt his stomach drop as the CIA helicopter leaped off the lawn, banked hard, and accelerated faster than he ever imagined a helicopter could move.

This is a classic ignorant writer passage. If the helicopter could leap off the lawn — which it might, depending on load — Langdon’s stomach wouldn’t drop. He might feel pushed back in his seat. The only time you’re likely to feel a helicopter motion in your stomach is if the helicopter entered autorotation, which feels — especially the first time — as if you’ve crested the top hill of a kiddie roller coaster and are suddenly zipping downward.

As for accelerating fast, I don’t know much about Robert Langdon’s imagination, but helicopters generally don’t accelerate quickly. It’s not like slamming down the gas pedal in a Ferrari in first gear. (In fact, one of the challenges I face when photographing car and boat races is catching up to a high-speed car or boat that has passed us while we’re hovering.) Can’t say I’ve flown a Black Hawk lately, though.

Langdon held his breath as the helicopter dropped from the sky toward Dupont Circle. A handful of pedestrians scattered as the aircraft descended through an opening in the trees and landed hard on the lawn just south of the famous two-tiered fountain designed by the same two men who created the Lincoln Memorial.

There’s that hard-landing helicopter again. Maybe the problem is that Brown — and most of the rest of the population — doesn’t understand that helicopters don’t just “drop out of the sky” to land. There’s a thing called “settling with power” that will basically ensure a very hard landing if you descend too quickly straight down.

And don’t even get me started on the encyclopedic fact that has nothing to do with the plot, fouling up the end of that sentence.

Once everyone had jumped out, the pilot immediately lifted off, banking to the east, where he would climb to “silent altitude” and provide invisible support from above.

Silent altitude? What’s that? About 50,000 feet? I don’t know of any altitude above a point where a helicopter would be silent — especially if it still had to provide “invisible support” — whatever that is. I look forward to the day when the words silent and helicopter can be used in the same sentence as adjective describing noun.

The UH-60 pilot threw his rotors into overdrive, trying to keep his skids from touching any part of the large glass skylight. He knew the six thousand pounds of lift force that surged downward from his rotors was already straining the glass to its breaking point. Unfortunately, the incline of the pyramid beneath the helicopter was efficiently shedding the thrust sideways, robbing him of lift.

He threw his rotors into what? What the hell is that supposed to mean? And what’s with the “six thousand pounds of lift force” surging down from this rotors? Is he trying to say that rotor wash is exerting 6,000 pounds of force?

Hello? Helicopters do not work just like big fans blowing air down to fly. They have wings, just like airplanes do. Airfoils create the lift that makes a helicopter fly. Downwash just helps a bit when the helicopter is near the ground. That’s called ground effect.

And let’s look at this in real life — the helicopter had only 2 or 3 people on board. It had already discharged its passengers. Is Brown trying to say that the pilot was depending on ground effect to fly? On a winter night (cold; it landed on “frosty grass” once) in Washington DC (sea level)? How did it get off the ground with passengers on board — let alone leap into the sky — if it couldn’t even hover out of ground effect when it was nearly empty?

And what’s all this about skids? Didn’t we already establish that the Black Hawk has wheels? If you can’t read the words, Mr. Brown, at least look at the pictures.

Errors like this just prove that the writer has no understanding of how helicopters fly. Yet this and many of the other helicopter-related errors in this book could have been prevented if the passages were handed off to an experienced helicopter pilot as part of the editing process.

But I guess a bestselling author is beyond all that.

Flying, In Books fact, fiction, helicopters, novels, review, writing

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Doing my part to preserve history and get out-of-copyright books into digital format.

About a month ago, before I left home for the summer, I stumbled upon the Distributed Proofreaders Web site. The best way to describe the site is to echo the text on its home page under Site Concept:

Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process.

Here’s how it works. Someone, somewhere scans printed book pages into a computer as images. OCR software is applied to translate the text into machine-readable text characters. Then volunteer proofreaders step in and compare the original scanned pages to the editable text. Proofreaders follow a set of proofing guidelines to ensure consistency as they modify the translated text. Each page passes through a series of steps that eventually turns all of a book’s pages into a single text document. That document is then released as a free ebook in a variety of formats via Project Gutenberg.

I became a volunteer. So far, I’ve proofed 14 pages. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot — and it’s not — but if 100 people each proofed 14 pages a week, 1,400 pages a week would be proofed. That’s what the “distributed” in Distributed Proofreading is all about.

The good part about being a proofreader — other that warm, fuzzy feeling you get from helping to make the world a better place — is that you get to read lots of old books about topics that interest you. The day I joined, I proofread two pages of a New York newspaper account of World War I. It was fascinating. Today, I proofread 12 pages of a biography of Benjamin Franklin, who I believe is the greatest American who ever lived. (There is a lot to be learned from Franklin’s life and writings.)

Why am I blogging about this? Well, I’m hoping that other folks will embrace this project and donate an hour or two a week (or a month) to proofreading pages. The more folks who work on this project, the more quickly these great old books and other pieces of literature will get into free digital format for readers and students to enjoy.

Want to help ebooks thrive? Give distributed proofreading a try.

Deep Thoughts, In Books books, copyright, ebooks, public domain

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