Life In 19x19

Getting back to Go book publishing, maybe it's worth looking at ebooks for the other "mind sports."

For chess, Everyman Chess offers ebooks in pgn and cbv (chessbase) formats.

For bridge, Master Point Press offers ebooks in pdf, ebup, and mobi formats.

It looks like both of these publishers' ebooks are free of DRM. I don't know how they're doing, but maybe go book publishers interested in ebooks should contact them to see.

prokofiev wrote:It looks like both of these publishers' ebooks are free of DRM. I don't know how they're doing, but maybe go book publishers interested in ebooks should contact them to see.

Slate and Shell has offered one in sgf format.
http://www.slateandshell.com/SSYY015.html

Kiseido Digital of course has the bookshelf, go world archive, and go review in PDF.

So far I've bought the bookshelf and go world archive. I plan to buy go review at some point.

oren wrote:Slate and Shell has offered one in sgf format.
http://www.slateandshell.com/SSYY015.html

Kiseido Digital of course has the bookshelf, go world archive, and go review in PDF.

So far I've bought the bookshelf and go world archive. I plan to buy go review at some point.

Kiseido Digital is great, but the chess and bridge examples are a bit different in that both of them are actively publishing new books which come out as paper and ebooks.

I didn't know about the one Slate and Shell ebook (beyond the ebooks they sell through SmartGo Books), thanks.

Redundant wrote:There's also the fact that getting digital music legally in some formats is nearly impossible. For example, I've never come across a place that sells FLAC, my preferred audio format.

That's because it's wasteful. While i think a 128kbps MP3 is enough in most cases, upwards of 192 it's really hard to tell the difference, and i'll bet money you cannot distinguish 256kbps+ from your FLAC.

oren wrote:Kiseido Digital of course has the bookshelf, go world archive, and go review in PDF.

I also bought the digital bookshelf. Later, i was a little pissed off to find a pirate version of enclosure josekis (maybe the other titles too, i don't remember) and noticing it was OCR while my legal copy was ten times the file size and a blurry image scan.

Sheeple wrote:

Redundant wrote:There's also the fact that getting digital music legally in some formats is nearly impossible. For example, I've never come across a place that sells FLAC, my preferred audio format.

That's because it's wasteful. While i think a 128kbps MP3 is enough in most cases, upwards of 192 it's really hard to tell the difference, and i'll bet money you cannot distinguish 256kbps+ from your FLAC.

Honestly, I find 128kbps and 192kbps pretty unlistenable these days. While I have not done much blind testing on this, I have had the experience of thinking that something was off, only to discover that I was listening to a 192kbps rip. With any good headphones, even a simple cymbal will sound off if you listen carefully. I'll agree that I can't really distinguish between 256kbps from FLAC, but I also have sufficient hard drive space that the size difference doesn't matter, and knowing that there is no difference from CD quality is important to me. Also, with FLAC I can transcode to any other format without the loss of quality that comes from doing transcodes from lossy encodes to lossy encodes. As MP3 may one day become useless, being able to transcode into a new format is important to me.

Redundant wrote:

Sheeple wrote:

Redundant wrote:There's also the fact that getting digital music legally in some formats is nearly impossible. For example, I've never come across a place that sells FLAC, my preferred audio format.

That's because it's wasteful. While i think a 128kbps MP3 is enough in most cases, upwards of 192 it's really hard to tell the difference, and i'll bet money you cannot distinguish 256kbps+ from your FLAC.

Honestly, I find 128kbps and 192kbps pretty unlistenable these days. While I have not done much blind testing on this, I have had the experience of thinking that something was off, only to discover that I was listening to a 192kbps rip. With any good headphones, even a simple cymbal will sound off if you listen carefully. I'll agree that I can't really distinguish between 256kbps from FLAC, but I also have sufficient hard drive space that the size difference doesn't matter, and knowing that there is no difference from CD quality is important to me. Also, with FLAC I can transcode to any other format without the loss of quality that comes from doing transcodes from lossy encodes to lossy encodes. As MP3 may one day become useless, being able to transcode into a new format is important to me.

How much hd space do you have such that storing all your music as flac is not an issue?

I'm guessing fifty dollars worth of hard drive space? I have a music collection of around 7,000 songs, mostly in FLAC, and it only takes up about 300 GB.

FWIW, bleep.com sells FLACs.

jts wrote:How much hd space do you have such that storing all your music as flac is not an issue?

Right now I have over 1 terabyte of free hard drive space and 6.34 terabytes total.

Redundant wrote:FLAC

Man, you're sure taking a lot of... FLAC... over your preferences. (Sorry, can't resist the obvious pun!)

Chew Terr wrote:

Redundant wrote:FLAC

Man, you're sure taking a lot of... FLAC... over your preferences. (Sorry, can't resist the obvious pun!)

It really doesn't bother me. I may be an audio snob, but I'm the kind that really likes to convert others.

I like FLAC, too. But then again, I wish we could buy movies at the full quality of the initial film, regardless of how much space it takes.

nagano wrote:I like FLAC, too. But then again, I wish we could buy movies at the full quality of the initial film, regardless of how much space it takes.

Buy yourself a cinema theater
I'm sure you'll be able to buy full quality movies then.

Slate and Shell has offered one in sgf format.
http://www.slateandshell.com/SSYY015.html

I bought this, $3 so not a tough decision. The only problem is that the comments are not always sync'ed with the moves - for example game 1, move 6 variation, the comment appears at the start of the variation then you move on to see what the move is and the comment disappears - because of where they put the comment in the sgf file. It's annoying enough that I may re-format the sgf files to better display the comments.

Redundant wrote:

jts wrote:How much hd space do you have such that storing all your music as flac is not an issue?

Right now I have over 1 terabyte of free hard drive space and 6.34 terabytes total.

Well, if I had that much space I would probably prefer flac too. Do you keep a separate music library for portable devices?

Bantari, I think the immorality lies in the publisher-artist relationship, not pub-consumer. The consumer is being licensed a work (which I don't like, but as you say agree to) but the artist is being reimbursed for a sale, which gives less royalties. The originator is therefore being swindled. I think there are court cases knocking around somewhere about this issue but I read about it a while ago so can't remember the details. Is that more clear?

Interestingly, few people are up in arms with mass media campaigns, new laws etc. when large companies are stealing from individuals, but we all know this story well.

EDIT: Just to add, I think the way licenses are used is also pretty iffy. I often see notices when I buy hard/software that opening the package constitutes accepting the license... which is inside the package. What?! Not to mention that these things are intentionally long and hard to read. And yet (despite your assumptions, which I will assume were for rhetorical power) I actually do read a selection of them, just to check what I am agreeing to and look out for egregious terms.