Free (iTunes) A Century of Chinese Cinema [Film History & Interviews + Multilingual]

[ATDrake]

A Century of Chinese Cinema is the commemorative e-book version of a major exhibition last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, free courtesy of the TIFF organizers themselves.

This is an amazingly nice freebie and very likely the second-best freebie we've been given that I've ever seen. Seriously, this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Not only does it have a thorough overview of Chinese cinema through the decades from its initial silent beginnings up to the latest action dramas from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as mainland China, with plenty of sidebars on important and influential films, but it's also packed full of video lectures from academics from the University of Toronto and elsewhere, interviews with top Chinese film directors such as Chen Kaige (IMDB, Wikipedia) and Johnnie To (IMDB, Wikipedia), among others, as well as round-table discussions between them on various aspects of Chinese film.

And it's also bilingual, with all text in both English and Mandarin Chinese, and all videos subtitled with Mandarin Chinese characters for the English-speaking portions (as well as Johnnie To, who's mostly speaking Cantonese in his interview). So in case you wanted to practice your language skills in either direction…

Sadly, TIFF seems to have taken down the special website where they used to host all the materials related to this exhibition, but you can still read a bit about it via the CBC news article on it last year, which gives you a much better idea of what's inside than the blurb below: TIFF's Chinese film retrospective traces ups and downs of greater China

If you have any interest whatsoever in Chinese film/culture in particular and/or arts history in general, I highly recommend this e-book. It's absolutely wonderful and you'll learn a great deal from it.

(ETA 2: provided you can read it in the first place, that is. This is a Made for iBooks title which will require an iDevice/Mac with the iBooks app; please see the product page for minimum requirement details.)

Currently free @ iTunes (available worldwide, as far as I can tell; I spot-checked random countries like Sweden and the TIFF e-books seemed to be free even there). This is a huge, nearly 2 GB file, so you'll probably want to download to your computer/sideload rather than using 3G on your iDevice, but it's well worth the time and space it'll take up.

Unfortunately for the benefit of people living outside the official iTunes Store-serving countries, I couldn't find a direct download for this the way some of the space organizations have for their science Made for iBooks titles so people could just open them in the iBooks app without having to have a valid store account.

But TIFF has generously made this free since its inception, and hopefully they keep it that way until everyone around the world can get it.

(ETA: if you have further interest in the subject, there's also a nice audio lecture podcast and an introduction/audience question segment from the British Film Institute via iTunes U by the same name.)

And this has been the selected (deliberately, this time) 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Enjoy!

Description
This free e-book offers a panoramic overview of TIFF's landmark film series and exhibition A Century of Chinese Cinema through critical essays, scholarly roundtables, and commentary by some of the most esteemed filmmakers and world-renowned authorities on Chinese cinema.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Thanks for not only the link, but also your research into the exhibition, review of the multimedia book, explanation of its context and helpful look into where the free download was available. Very much appreciated.

It should also be mentioned that a Mac or iPad is necessary to open the e-book, with iBooks 1.0 and OS 10.9 or later installed on the first and iBooks 3.0 or later installed on the second.

[ATDrake]

Sorry, I thought I'd kind of covered that in the bit of text under the freebie link, where it's kind of assumed that you need an iDevice/the iBooks app to get it.

I'll be sure to note the device requirements for these kinds of multimedia Made for iBooks more explicitly in the future.

Thanks for your feedback.

[GameMonsters]

Thank you for this freebie and the detailed information ... downloading in my iTune now.

[Prestidigitweeze]

ATDrake:

That wasn't meant as a criticism at all. Yours is probably the most thoroughly explained link to a deal I've ever read and I only meant to convey my thanks.

My post was intended to be a footnote for Mac users who have reasons for not upgrading to Maverick. I'm a musician who won't be upgrading on my primary Mac until the plugins I need for Logic and Performer are all updated to be compatible as well (niche music software companies can be excruciatingly slow).

Someone who looks at the link in iTunes probably realizes that iTunes itself is required but might not lengthen the window (or scroll past the bottom border) to reveal the qualifier that states they also need specific software and hardware to open the book.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by ATDrake
Free (iTunes) A Century of Chinese Cinema [Film History & Interviews + Multilingual]
A Century of Chinese Film is the commemorative e-book version of a major exhibition last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, free courtesy of the TIFF organizers themselves.

This is an amazingly nice freebie and very likely the second-best freebie we've been given that I've ever seen. Seriously, this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
. . . .

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

. . . .
It should also be mentioned that a Mac or iPad is necessary to open the e-book, with iBooks 1.0 and OS 10.9 or later installed on the first and iBooks 3.0 or later installed on the second.

I am one who loathes iTunes; I know that there are others share my feelings, but I don't know how many others. I will probably pass up this deal because of that, although it sounds like a really nice book (thanks ATDrake for posting it!).

I wish that all ebook publishers who publish on iTunes would make their offerings available simultaneously on at least the Kindle format also. Does anyone know why a publisher wouldn't (in order to keep from being egregiously O.T., no discussion please)? Thankfully, the iTunes-only thingie seems to be pretty rare.

Okay, I've vented my spleen.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Normally, I'm not a fan of the iBook format for the simple reason that it's nigh impossible to convert.

However, the two books to which ATDrake has linked are more like the CD- and DVD-ROMs of the '80s and '90s than text-driven books. Issues of format seem less relevant here, since epub and azw aren't really meant for content like this.

The books were part of the presentation at a film festival and constitute the sort of expensive artifacts with which most of us never get the chance to play. Normally, we'd pay ridiculous prices at, say, the MoMA book shop for this sort of content, so any person who's interested in film as an art form might be glad to know about these links.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

My post was intended to be a footnote for Mac users who have reasons for not upgrading to Maverick.

Hey, I understand totally. I'm still keeping my Mac Mini on 10.6 because I have old PPC software which I can only use with Rosetta, and I wouldn't even be using 10.9 myself on the MacBook Pro if it hadn't been a totally free upgrade (and I keep the original install of 10.8 on a bootable external hard drive, just in case).

But I will be sure to note that there are particular system requirements for some stuff in the future, because for years I collected the iTunes freebies not knowing if I'd ever get an iDevice to use them on and that they generally weren't DRM-strippable/convertible, and then lo and behold, Apple finally released the iBooks app for Mavericks.

So conceivably some other posters might want to do some similar future maybe-one-day-I'll-be-in-a-position-to-read-this with regards to their own collections.

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

I wish that all ebook publishers who publish on iTunes would make their offerings available simultaneously on at least the Kindle format also. Does anyone know why a publisher wouldn't (in order to keep from being egregiously O.T., no discussion please)? Thankfully, the iTunes-only thingie seems to be pretty rare.

Well, in the case of the Made for iBooks books, it's probably because they're really multimedia presentations that are often built around the additional specialized content (not just the videos, but also sometimes interactive quiz stuff and pop-up pictures/captions/sidebars) that there isn't really a standardized e-book format for.

It's like the way that Amazon has the Kindle with Audio/Video format or B&N has the NOOK Enhanced/NOOK Kids Read To Me formats which require one of their devices or a supporting app so it's a bit unusual for those sorts of books to make it across to multiple stores, unless the publisher has some kind of major financial incentive (or sufficient volunteer tech resources) to do so. (And I personally still can't open any of the few I've picked up free.)

It may be that there seem to be a lot of Made for iBooks books out there because the iBooks Author software is easier for most people to use than the various Kindle format creators (or maybe it just seems that way because as a Canadian, it's harder for me to find Kindle Audio/Video freebies as many of them seem to be geo-restricted to the US and I have to go through this entire rigmarole of opening up another browser and resetting my shopping country to check whereas the iTunes ones are just an easy keyword search/filter to show only free books away in the iBooks Mac app).

Anyway, there are a lot of really nifty Made for iBooks freebies out there, which I will be eventually posting spaced out with the more regular e-book ones, but I've tried to look for at least PDF alternatives to some of them (the science and education people tend to be pretty good about that sort of thing) for people who can't access the multimedia versions but would still be interested in just the regular text/picture content.