Why have you purchased public-domain eBooks?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Should I be counting the 100 PD ebooks that came on the original Kobo and Kobo WiFi?

I'd forgotten those! I think I have a list somewhere of what all of those were.

[DNSB]

I've got a zip file of them I downloaded years back. Reminds me of my first contact with Kobo support when the original refused to open a book with a ' in the title. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Dug out an epub with the list of the books which should be attached to this message.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by John F

If you want the last poll option removed, how about deleting the second post since it is not about a copyrighted book?

It most certainly is about a book in copyright. The translation and the images make it in copyright.

[John F]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It most certainly is about a book in copyright. The translation and the images make it in copyright.

My apologies. The question was about books in the public domain. The second post starts talking about a post that isn't in the the public domain. The second post needs to be deleted.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I seem to recall purchasing some PD books on a CD back in the '90s when I was reading them on a Sony Clie

Same here (but I had a Palm Pilot). My reason was "other." Specifically, convenience.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've got a zip file of them I downloaded years back. Reminds me of my first contact with Kobo support when the original refused to open a book with a ' in the title. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Dug out an epub with the list of the books which should be attached to this message.

Pity they stopped including these. The three times I've gifted people e-readers, I also had to gift them some books, just so it wasn't an awkward "Here's a gift, now you get to start paying money to use it." kind of thing. It's easy enough to point them to Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks or whatnot, but then I have to immediately teach them about sideloading, as opposed to just letting them start playing with their new thing.

[JSWolf]

Has anybody knowingly purchased a 100% public-domain eBook?

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Has anybody knowingly purchased a 100% public-domain eBook?

"Better formatting", i.e., no additional copyrighted material, qualifies. And sometimes, even if a book is pd, there's no free copy available.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by issybird

"Better formatting", i.e., no additional copyrighted material, qualifies. And sometimes, even if a book is pd, there's no free copy available.

I agree you would have to buy the eBook if you cannot get a copy for free.

[ekbell]

As well as buying books with copywritten translations and books with additional material, I've also bought PD books because I wanted to read them and they were not yet available on the PD sites I knew about at the time. Living in a country that was until recently life+50, it hasn't been uncommon for books to be in the PD domain and available for purchase but not yet posted on a PD site.

This also avoids any moral or legal considerations involved in downloading a book that isn't in copyright for my location but is in copyright at the host site :-)

[gweeks]

I've bought a couple to be able to buy the audio books from Amazon as well. I've bought a few to get an ebook when I couldn't find one readily available for free and didn't feel like doing my own conversion. Not very often though as I'm usually willing to wait for pgdp to get through them.

Greg

[aborh]

I had bought a few titles from the Kindle store and later, the Kobo store, but formatting is often still not the greatest.

Since I discovered standardebooks.org, I have not bought another. Standard Ebooks does a fantastic job of formatting public domain works and gives them nicely styled covers as well. And they are free in both senses of the word. Formats include azw for Kindle, kepub for Kobo, and epub for almost everything else. Check em out!

[ownedbycats]

It's a bad idea to mention Standard Ebooks within earshot of JSWolf.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by aborh

I had bought a few titles from the Kindle store and later, the Kobo store, but formatting is often still not the greatest.

Since I discovered standardebooks.org, I have not bought another. Standard Ebooks does a fantastic job of formatting public domain works and gives them nicely styled covers as well. And they are free in both senses of the word. Formats include azw for Kindle, kepub for Kobo, and epub for almost everything else. Check em out!

Take your Standard EBooks and put then on your Kobo as ePub and watch the formatting go south. They have no idea how to code for a simply formatted eBook.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Take your Standard EBooks and put then on your Kobo as ePub and watch the formatting go south. They have no idea how to code for a simply formatted eBook.

Is that the compatible ePub, the Kobo kepub.epub or the advanced ePub? I haven't seen any issues with a compatible ePub on a Kobo as an ePub nor with a kepub.epub on a Kobo as a kepub using the WebKit based renderer. I have only tried an advanced ePub on Thorium and they work quite well there. You did read the warning beside the Advanced ePub download link? The one that reads "An advanced format that uses the latest technology not yet fully supported by most ereaders."

Yes, the styles tend to be quite complex but OTOH, damn few people even Mobileread members, ever look at the styles. And, yes, Standard eBooks uses ePub3 as their basic format. Considering that the original ePub3 spec was released in 2011, it is perhaps time to stop insisting that all ebooks being in ePub2 format in necessary.

Not everyone still wants to format an ebook for ADE 2. And oddly, testing on my Kobo, the version of RMSDK used by Kobo does seem to treat any ePub2 or ePub3 property that it does not implement or has an invalid value as a null operation as the ePub spec requires. After all, they are not errors such as leaving off the ; at the end of a property/value line or the } at the end of a selector. As usual, cascade and specificity also apply.