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RE: Reading books for free — The ethics of piracy in poverty
Love this and I, too, have wrestled with this dilemma. There's a great site called: Project Gutenberg. It holds over 56K books for free. Most of them have surpassed their copyright so you're not doing the author a disservice and some of these older books are literally amazing.
As for taking the odd free download: I don't see the harm in it personally. If you were not in a position to buy it in the first place, the author loses nothing by you downloading a freebie.
In fact... as a writer, it feels good when people read your stuff, right. I heard one artist (painter) say that the greatest compliment he ever had was having one of his paintings stolen. :D
Ha! I've never seen someone steal any of my paintings or writings, but here on Steemit with all the plagiarists, I know that they don't require a lot of quality. They like it, they take it and publish it under their own name. So I don't know if I'd take it as a compliment or as an insult (that they could claim to have a mind as great as mine... laughs in arrogance. lol)
Nah, Siriusly, I don't know what I'd feel but it's probably not the greatest compliment for me. :P
My problem with Project Gutemberg and the like is that I've tried to read old stuff and I think that Shakespeare is the only author older than 100 years that I can stand (that I've read so far). Also, my tastes go around sci-fi and post-modern fantasy. I think that these styles are recent enough not to have any proper examples in such a gallery. Unlucky!
But these days I've been trying to research a lot about writing styles, so I might head to Project Gutemberg anyway to check a lot of their books and compare the styles of the writers. :)
Lol... yes, plenty of plagiarists on steemit haha.
Yeah, some of the old stuff is tiresome to read. They got away with writing long, drawn-out sections on scenery, making it a bit slow for me. Shakespeare: oh, he's awesome but difficult to read. I remember the torture of this at school. His stuff was written for performance and I think that's how he's best enjoyed. Reading him is just painful for me :D
Sci-fi. I hear ya. I love the stuff, and speculative fiction. Maybe there'll be some early examples around in Guttenberg. Have you read any Philip K Dick or Margaret Atwood? They're great in their respective genres.
cheers
yay! another hero to the rescue, so glad there are those that exist that have this info on hand! i prefer paper books so i buy or borrow from library. :p