- It’s been a rough week here (hence the current post paucity) and I just got Carol on a plane to Chicago to look after some unexpected family issues. As we left the driveway it was snowing like hell again, this on the morning of May 15. Even today, halfway to lunchtime, it’s still gray-grim and 39 degrees. I guess it’s going to be another indoors week. Much planned for coming days, including the ebook release of Cold Hands and Other Stories. Stay tuned.
- I stopped in Denver on the way home from the airport to pick up some Elfa parts to expand the shelf system in the back of our garage. It’s an Erector set for storage, and if you don’t know about Elfa I think it would be worth taking a look. I have a hodgepodge closet in my workshop downstairs that desperately needs to be Elfa-whacked, and it’s on the project list for this summer.
- I used to spend a lot of time poking around in Google Earth, mostly looking for abandoned railroad right-of-ways near where I’ve lived in the past. Since then The Daily Google Earth has appeared, full of interesting things visible from space. Today’s desert triangles post intrigues me, since my parents bought land in that general area in the 1960s and I still own it.
- Carol and I have moved incrementally to CFLs as our incandscents have died, but the can fixtures we have in our ceilings are too narrow to pass the necks of CFL floods. Alas, this promising new technology won’t fix that (the necks are, if anything, wider) but it’s a promising alternative to incandescents and doesn’t contain mercury. As the author suggests, it won’t be long before the Maker community figures out how to focus the output into a beam and perhaps even scan it across the bulb’s face.
- I’m not generally one for weird case mods and exotic custom cases, but this Priarie School item engenders a certain amount of lust. I also realize that I could easily make a case of Stickley-style dark-stained quarter-sawn oak–not that I need another thing to do. Would be killer cool, though.
- As a programmer guy with old roots in embedded systems, I feel a very deep itch to try the Android Open Accessory Kit. Alas, as an SF writer with only so many hours in the day, I may not get to it soon. But I greatly rejoice that it’s even possible.
- The data caps issue has gotten to the WSJ, which probably means that it’s off geek turf and Really Quite Sincerely Real. What few people are talking about with respect to ISP data caps these days is the perverse incentive they present for video piracy: Why pay an additional “bandwidth tax” on your favoite films each time they’re streamed when you can download them once and watch them any time you want without further payment? This has always been the case, but moving to a metered Internet only makes it worse.
- From the ‘Bout-Damned-Time Department: Samsung’s Galaxy line of phones and tablets will be getting its Gingerbread update any day now. We hope. Any day now. Guys, really?
- Bruce Baker sent me a link to sculpture made of books, sculpture as I suspect termites understand it. The last picture made me cringe a little: It’s a carved-up copy of all three volumes of the 1936 New Century Dictionary, which has been my go-to word source now for almost thirty years. What other dictionary (none here!) can show you drawings of a wanderoo and a wanigan on the same page?
- Not all engineering problems are nice and clean and up on top of a well-lit bench. Especially this one.
- If ebook readers ever push print books over the edge of the world, it’ll be due to much higher resolution displays. This one, at 458 DPI, is very close to what you see on mass-market four-color interior printing. At 600 DPI (and we’ll be there in a few years) the war will be over.
- Boy. Here’s a kind-of-a-sort-of-a-thing-a-ma-jigger. A display that hinges in the middle? As a friend of mine once said: “Laugh or lust? Flip a coin.”
- Inevitable: I Can Has Zeppelin.
Odd Lots
Now Available: Copperwood Double #1
I am pleased (and you wouldn’t believe how relieved!) to announce the availability of the first Copperwood Double, Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings, in both print and ebook editions. The ebook edition is available from Amazon’s Kindle store in mobi format, and from B&N in epub format, both at $2.99. No DRM in either case. And because there’s no DRM, you can download the free app Calibre and use its excellent conversion utilities to convert mobi or epub to any of several additional ebook formats. The print edition is distributed through Ingram/Lightning Source and is thus available from online retailers who work with Ingram, which would be basically all of them. $11.99. (Note: The print book is not available from Lulu.com. This was a major decision that I’ll talk about in a future entry.)
If the cover image above seems bizarre to you, well, you’re younger than you look. The grayhairs among us know precisely what I was reaching for: The Ace Doubles of the period 1952-1973. Each volume consisted of two short novels from 25,000-50,000 words in length, bound back-to-back and inverted, each with its own cover image. Ace did not invent the physical print/bind arrangement, which is called tete-beche (head-to-tail) and has existed for almost 200 years. They did make it a mainstay of recreational reading for two decades, and most of us back then had a pile of them.
A lot of people thought it was a weird idea (and many made fun of it) but we forget that the short novel as a form essentially vanished from SFF after Ace stopped publishing doubles. The magazines won’t publish something 40,000 words long, and 40,000 words is too short for a conventional print book unless you’re way out there in small and very small press. So there was this huge hole between 20,000-word novellas and 80,000 word novels. I fell into that trap in 1981, when my Firejammer clocked in at just under 30,000 words. I shopped it, but unless you’re Larry Niven no one’s going to seriously look at something that length.
I like the short novel as a distinct literary form. It’s long enough to develop some ideas and a few interesting characters, but short enough to require a certain focus, and a fairly linear plot line. It deserves to have a place in the SFF world, and two recent developments have conspired to give it one: ebooks and print-on-demand publishing. Ebooks have no strong length requirements, and from what I’ve read, the length of original ebook novels is drifting downward. More to the point, a story can be given the length it needs, and authors aren’t under pressure to pad an idea out to print novel length, or compress it to magazine novella length or less.
Print-on-demand publishing allows publishers to try interesting things without betting the house on the outcome. I will always love print books and still buy them in respectable quantities, but in these troubled times print publishers must be conservative to avoid going broke. (Do I know a little bit about that or what?) The beancounters require that a book recoup its capital costs, which means that books hover within certain boundaries set by retailer expectations. (Remember that if retailers won’t stock a book, customers never get the chance to vote on it. Retailers therefore have what amounts to a veto on print publisher publishing programs.) Slightly whacky things like tete-beche double novels fall outside ordinary bricks’n’mortar retail channel expectations, but POD manufacturing and online ordering make a lot of things possible.
So I offer you a book with two covers, and two authors telling two stories in one world, the Drumlins world that I introduced in Asimov’s back in 2002 with “Drumlin Boiler”. There’s much more to say, and I’ll continue the discussion (with specifics on both stories) in days to come.
Victoria Duntemann and Lady Julian
Today is Mother’s Day, and I celebrate it in eternal memory of Victoria Albina Pryes Duntemann 1924-2000. But today is also something else: May 8, the feast day of Lady Julian of Norwich, denied sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church for daring to suggest that God would triumph over Hell. Lady Julian is my personal patron saint, and I have declared her the Patron Saint of Gonzo Optimism: All manner of thing will be well. All. No exceptions. It don’t get much more gonzo than that.
Lady Julian was very careful of what she said, and had to be, lest she be burnt at the stake by her mass-murdering psychopath of a bishop, Henry Despenser, who ordered the Lollard Pits to be dug near Norwich and then gleefully filled them. The message of Lady Julian’s visions, which she hid well and could barely believe herself, was as simple as it was audacious: God will not settle for anything less than the salvation of everyone and everything.
It’s one of those painful ironies that I heard of Lady Julian only a couple of years before my mother’s death. Victoria Duntemann’s religion was an insane Polish peasant amplification of the fringes of Triumphal Catholicism, and basically consisted of Hell plus debris. That said, she took it only a little farther than the grim priests of my childhood parish, who gripped Hell to their hearts like an infernal teddy bear. Whether they understood it that way or not (and I think some did) they defined Catholicism as what you had to do to stay out of Hell, which ultimately cooked down to obeying them without question and having as little to do with sex as possible. My mother and countless other goodhearted and sensitive people swallowed this blasphemy whole, and in far too many cases (my mother’s included) it crushed all hope from them.
Hell haunted my mother her entire life. I was at her bedside when she died, and I am convinced that she died of despair, fearing that sins either wholly imagined or minor and long forgiven would land her in unending torment. (Right: She who was a nurse all her life, comforting countless people and tending to both of her parents and later her husband in their final years, and giving ceaselessly of her time and money to the church that had taken such pains to terrify her–Hell-fodder, of course.) Managing my consequent anger has become one of the great challenges of my life.
Hell has got to go. It no longer frightens the evil, and causes only suffering among the good. It is an emblem of either a sadistic or a defeated God. Do we have the guts to imagine a better God, one who will out-stubborn the worst of us and bring the whole shebang back into divine wholeness before the curtain falls?
Already done: “And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying most comfortingly: I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and I will make all things well; and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.” Julian of Norwich, Showings, Chapter XXXI.
I may. I can. I shall. I will. What does He have to do, hit us over the head with a #7 frying pan?
I’m convinced. Given a few more years, I might have persuaded my mother. She understood me poorly, but she listened to me, and she took me seriously, as all good mothers must of the children they bring into the world. I built telescopes on her front lawn, and she was always willing to give me a dollar for one more damned pipe fitting to twist into the declination axis. She read and approved of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” which was my first published story, written in some respects for her. She didn’t read the pile of my computer books that she kept in a corner of the livingroom, but I think they got the message across that her only son was neither crazy nor stupid. Perhaps more significant than any of that, I think she saw something of herself in me, and recognized the ache for God that she herself felt and had tried to instill in her children. She was ready to hear me out long before I knew enough to begin speaking, but I didn’t begin speaking until she could no longer listen.
I managed to avoid the trap she fell into, and maybe that’s triumph enough. Mothers want the best for their children, and what I got was what she should have had: a religion that celebrates the fundamental goodness of all creation, and the inescapable love of God. She knows the truth now. Could Lady Julian have told her? (Better late than never!)
If not, then what are patron saints for?
Dell’s USFF Internal Amplified Speaker
I bought a Dell Optiplex GX620 USFF (Ultra-Small Form Factor) machine last week, and it came without an internal speaker. I didn’t know the speaker was optional until a machine turned up without one, but a look at my three SX280 USFF machines (built in exactly the same case) showed a very small plastic unit that pulls easily out of the chassis when you lift a plastic tab. It’s wired to the mobo through a conventional 4-pin header. And most interesting of all, it has circuitry on its back.
A look through a loupe showed four solder pads (on the left in the photo above) labeled P5V IN, SPK DET, GND and AUD MONO. These correspond to the red, white, black, and green leads respectively. It took me ten minutes to lash up a test on my Heath ET-3200 breadboard. With 5V on the red lead, common on the black lead, and some sine wave from my audio generator on the green lead, that one tiny little doodad filled the shop with an 800 Hz tone.
I’m pretty sure the SPK DET lead allows the computer to know if there’s a speaker in place; my VOM shows it tied to ground. The IC is almost certainly an LM4871 1.1W audio amp. The National Semi logo is on the chip, and the printed number is RA4871. The Dell part number for the assembly as a whole is Y2298.
I needed to order one for the GX620, so I ordered two, and if I need a subminiature speaker amp for a project, it’ll be in the drawer with my other small speakers, ready to go. $2.69 at the CompuFlea eBay store.
Lazarus, Stay Where You Are!
…because when you came forth, you stepped on my bootloader.
I’ve tried to like Lazarus. I’ve tried for years. I can only assume that (as also evidenced by its similarly screwy cousin, Kylix) there is something in the Linux platform that makes Pascal compilers go a little bit whacko.
A few days ago I installed the KDE Fedora Spin in a new partition on my Linux box. It’s been a good education in the Plasma desktop. Plasma is all very blue and cold looking (way too blue for me, in fact, though the default wallpaper is striking) but unlike my first taste or two of KDE 4, it actually works.
So I started installing the software I’m familiar with to begin using it, and somewhere down the list was Lazarus, the Delphi-ish GUI front end for FreePascal. The package available from Fedora was V0.9.28.2, which is considerably newer than the one I have installed on Ubuntu Lucid, and only a little older than the one you can get from the project Web site. After it downloaded and installed all of its enormous pile of stuff, it asked me to restart Linux. I did.
And grub failed to run.
All I got was a blinking text cursor in the upper-left corner of the screen. This is the first time I’ve ever seen grub fail, apart from the well-known habit of Windows to overwrite grub with its own bootloader. (This is why Windows goes in first, if you’re going to have it at all.) I booted the Ubuntu 11.04 live CD I’d burned a few days after it was released, just to see if my MBR had been damaged. As best I could tell it had not, but I’m not good enough at grub’s internals to really be able to tell what was wrong with the software itself. Since I had plenty of free space on the 750 GB drive, I just installed Ubuntu on yet another partition, hoping that its update of grub would put things right. And it did.
So why would installing a compiler and an IDE mess up the OS bootloader? (Anybody?) I don’t have a lot of clues. The copy of Lazarus I installed looks like it works as well as Lazarus ever does, so I can’t assume that something in the installer or the package glitched and overwrote something unrelated. None of the other partitions on the disk were affected, as best I can tell. I’m tempted to install Lazarus under Ubuntu, to see if it will stomp on Ubuntu’s copy of grub as well…but that will happen another day, when I’m not as busy and not so grouchy.
Odd Lots
- As I write this mid-afternoon on May 2, 2011, we’re in the thick of something approaching a blizzard here on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain. This is probably the coldest spring here since we arrived in April 2003. The beautiful warm weather of May, 2002 (when we first discovered Colorado Springs) might have been a fluke. Or maybe this is. No one can tell me.
- Here’s an interesting take on the value of media images as symbols, and to some extent supports what I said yesterday about Bin Laden’s death: We did our best not to leave images around to be turned into revered icons. That, coupled with the native Muslim caution about idolatry, will limit the man’s future power as a martyr.
- Fascinating bit of Old West history: Bass Reeves, one of the most successful US Marshals of his or any era, was black. (Thanks to Nick Hodges for the pointer.)
- VE3EN is losing his job mid-year, and his marvelous solar data aggregator may go dark. That would be a tragedy, though I’m not sure what can be done.
- I think I’m going to make one of these.
- Would a power-cord tethered high-resolution touchscreen all-in-one make a good armchair ebook reader? A smaller unit like this one could be, and would provide enough resolution to read art-heavy PDF-based ebooks without eyestrain, even with old eyes like mine. Now if they’d just allow us to take the legs off…
- Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are now visible in the east just before sunrise, and if you look quick you’ll see them all. (Mercury is the tricky one.)
- If you like volcanoes, Oregon State University has a nice aggregator for eruption news. There are some terrific photos here, and scary ones.
- Is this what it means to “sit on your brains”?
A Very Bright Line
Today’s Big Question cooks down to this: Is Bin Laden more valuable to Al Qaeda as a live leader or a dead martyr?
Hint: Name one Islamic martyr.
Here in the mostly unchurched West it’s easy to forget that Islam is an expression of radical monotheism. Islamic culture brooks no competitors to Allah, and takes the Old Testament proscription of “graven images” farther than any other major religion. It’s not about the images themselves, as we sometimes misunderstand, but about the underlying psychology of worship.
Catholicism’s great genius lay in absorbing the pagan cultures it converted rather than destroying them, and in consequence we revere saints and sometimes inanimate objects that are images of saints, are associated with saints (relics) or express sacred symbols. These are Christianized echoes of ancient polytheism, and looking at the myths of early Christianity, it’s easy to see the saints in the stories as small-g gods: They are larger-than-life because, well, they are larger than life, and have ascended into a graduated pantheon that from ancient times expressed the connectedness of humanity to the divine. A single, all-powerful God is a relatively recent addition to religious psychology, but Christianity simply placed God at the top of the pyramid, with all the saints below, revered but not worshipped. (I grant that drawing that line has always been a challenge.)
Here and now we’re comfortable with that, but a close reading of Eastern history shows the sometimes bloody tension between monotheism and these ancient echoes of polytheism. I just finished John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium, which went into considerable detail about iconoclasm, a religious conflict that tore through the Byzantine Empire circa 750. People were killing one another over questions of what should be revered, and how. (I think it’s no coincidence that Islam itself appeared barely a century earlier.) Byzantium basically anathematized representational sculpture in the eighth century, and afterward confined religious artwork to painted (not graven; i.e., shaped or sculpted) images. This was a compromise. Many in the iconoclast faction at the time wanted no representational art at all.
Islam goes farther still. It reveres the ancient prophets (up to and including Mohammed, considered the greatest and the last) but demands that worship be directed to God and God only, and is constantly on guard against the temptation to idolatry. Living leaders provide inspiration and are given obedience, but once leaders die, they move into God’s territory, and some very strict rules begin to apply to those still on Earth. Revering a deceased leader too much begins to resemble idolatry, and Muslims have a very deep caution about idolatry.
We in the West don’t call it “hero worship” for nothing.
My thought is that Bin Laden’s death will be an inspiration to his followers, but not too much and not for long. He was a very bright guy, skillful and extremely lucky, and Al Qaeda will miss him sorely as a leader. His power as a martyr and a symbol will be limited, however, in a religion where history and hagiography are separated by a very bright line.
Fedora Spin: KDE Desktop
Sometime back I ran into a concept called Fedora Spins, which are customized Fedora installs with different desktops (KDE, LXDE, XFCE) or a slant in some direction like security, graphics, or games. I downloaded the KDE Spin ISO earlier today, burned it to CD, and this evening (having burned out on ebooks) took it for a…ride. I had 300 GB of free space on my Linux box, so there was no reason not to, and I’d like to get a little better at the KDE Plasma desktop.
Some reactions:
- The Fedora partitioner is very good. I did a manual partition operation, and created a new 60 GB partition for Fedora, and a 12 GB swap partition. It helps to know a little bit about partitioners generally, but overall it was intuitive and gave me no trouble.
- For some reason, Fedora installs grub with grub’s hiddenmenu option enabled. (It’s conceivable that I accidentally chose that somehow, but I don’t recall being asked.) This means that at boot time, grub’s menu isn’t displayed, and the system boots directly into Fedora. (The system already has Ubuntu Lucid and Windows XP on it.) You can get the boot menu by pressing F10 during grub’s timeout period, but otherwise you aren’t presented with an OS menu at all.
- Fedora recognized the existence of my XP partition, but didn’t know what it was. In grub’s menu, XP is therefore listed as “Other.” However, if you select it, grub boots it just fine.
- Fedora has a GUI bootloader configuration utility that allows selection of the timeout value and the default OS. However, the utility’s sole window does not have a Save or Apply button. You can make changes, but closing the utility throws them away. Wow. This is a bug, and not a brand-new one.
- Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora does not automatically add the initial user account to the sudoers list. So try to do anything rootish like editing grub’s config file gives you that inane message “jduntemann is not in the sudoers list. This incident will be reported.”
- Adding yourself to the sudoers list is seriously unintuive, but the best way is probably to use the visudo command, which opens a vi edit window with the sudoers list ready to change. Add USERNAME ALL=(ALL) ALL to the end of the file and save; it’s done. Details here.
- Fixing grub requires editing the grub.conf file and commenting out the hiddenmenu option. While I was there, I also changed the description of the XP partition from “Other” to “Windows XP.”
- A 2.8 GHz Dell SX280 does not have sufficient graphics chops to run Plasma’s desktop effects. I wanted to see just how slow they were, but within seconds of enabling desktop effects, Fedora disabled them again. I knew that the SX280 wouldn’t run them well from my online research (it’s one reason I’m getting a more powerful Linux box shortly) but I didn’t know the system would simply refuse to run the effects against my wishes. Interestingly, Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop effects subsystem works on the same machine.
Overall, getting to a usable configuration with Fedora is a lot more screwing around than with Ubuntu. But once done, it works well. More as I experience it.
Odd Lots
- Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is out, and hardly anybody’s even mentioned it. Could it be that nobody’s really upgrading every six months anymore? (My workaday Linux system is still running 10.04.) I’m not bullish on Unity, and may reconsider Kubuntu when I set up a GX620-based Linux box in coming weeks.
- The formidable Al Williams has a three-part series on DDJ explaining how to use the visual tool App Inventor to create Android apps. I have not used App Inventor yet, but Al’s analysis of the challenges of using it (and of visual metaphors for programming generally) are worth reading. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
- John Scalzi has written a brand new Fuzzies novel. (Not furries, Fuzzies–tiny aliens created by H. Beam Piper.) Scalzi’s good–this one could be fun. I’ve read all the Fuzzies books (by Piper and others) and truly only like Little Fuzzy (the original) and Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning. Fuzzy Sapiens is so-so, and Fuzzies and Other People is so awful that Piper chose not to submit it for publication after he wrote it in 1962. It was found in a box after he committed suicide in 1964, and not published until the late 1980s.
- Interestingly, most of Piper’s copyrights were not renewed, and a great deal of his work (including Little Fuzzy) is now in the public domain. Go to the “P” author page on Project Gutenberg and scroll down.
- I heard years ago that armadillos are the only other mammalian species that contracts leprosy, but now there’s evidence that virtually all human cases of the disease (which is vanishingly rare these days) were contracted from them. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Illinois is banning trans fats in its schools (with a notable exception for doughnuts, how healthy!) but does anyone dare remind them that there is absolutely no trans fat in unhydrogenated lard? In terms of monounsaturated fat (the good fat) lard comes out better than butter, and both are far better than the vegetable oil spreads we call margarine. Funny how the more animal fat I eat, the more animal fat (my own!) that I lose. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the Illinois link.)
- And the much-reviled Dr. Eades makes the point that Mediterranean people who supposedly take all their foods as olive oil are actually doing a lot of their cooking in animal fats, especially lard. (They export the olive oil to people like us, who think it’s healthier.)
- This gets an award for something. I’m still not sure what.
Ebooks and Adding Value to the Public Domain
I just got our first two Copperwood Press ebooks posted to the Kindle store, and they’re now available for sale: Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings and “Whale Meat.” No DRM. I’m still working with Ingram’s Lightning Source to get the double mounted and sellable in its print edition. It won’t be available from Lulu, and over time I will be migrating my other print books from Lulu to Lightning. Learning their relatively unforgiving system the first time involves a little hair-tearing, but once learned it’s learned.
There’s certainly plenty to do in coming months to get the rest of my material converted to good ebooks and posted on the major retailers. One issue I’ve found troubling for some months now is the ambiguity regarding public domain material. Both B&N and Amazon make a big deal about whether a work is in the public domain. PD titles get lower royalty rates and just generally seem libri non grati on the retailer sites. This isn’t surprising in some ways. The retailers are trying to avoid having 2,774 versions of The War of the Worlds on their servers, taking up space and confusing the readership. The definition of “public domain” varies legally by country, and what may be free in Australia or Chile is not necessary free here. So they do have to be careful on the rights front.
The issue matters to me because of The Old Catholic Studies Series, a project that I’ve been tinkering for ten years now. The goal was to scan, OCR, edit, and lay out clean, indexed versions of the foundational texts of Old Catholicism so that people wouldn’t have to pay $200 to read yellowed, crumbly, scribbled-in books printed in 1874. I have two such texts currently available in print editions: The New Reformation and The Pope and the Council. They were a lot of work, but they’ve sold reasonably well, and I consider the effort worthwhile. (It was also damned good practice in making books.) Not a lot of people want them, but the people who do want them have been very happy with them. I would have done another two or three, but John Mabry’s Apocryphile Press got there ahead of me, and put out facsimile print editions of the other major works I had considered. I prefer new layouts to facsimile editions, but Apocryphile’s scans are fairly clean and I do recommend them.
It’s true that the source materials are long in the public domain (which at least in the US includes all books published before 1923) but technically, what I’m offering are derivative works. I scanned them, page by page, OCRed them to extract the text, and then went over the text character by character to eliminate OCR errors. (Some were a hoot: “The Frankish King Pepin…” became “The Prankish King Pepin…”) The books were not indexed, and I indexed them. I fixed a few typos (especially in The Pope and the Council, which was a hurried English translation of a work written originally in German) and Americanized the British spelling. Although I don’t claim to have done a copy edit on either book, I fixed a number of examples of what I consider regrettable diction. I wrote an introduction explaining what I did and how. I gave them nice covers. If I had another hundred years to live and no need to make a living, I would do a strong edit on both.
By any legal definition what I’ve produced are derivative works that are not themselves in the public domain. That said, anybody who took an OCR of The War of the Worlds and changed three words could make the same claim, and if enough people do that, the noise level at ebook retailer sites would go through the roof. Nobody’s PD ebooks would sell well enough for it to make anything like a reasonable new edition of any PD book worthwhile.
I don’t know precisely what the answer is. Vetting tens of thousands of $2.99 ebooks is a labor-intensive business, and what sorts of standards would apply? Refusing facsimile editions is obvious and easy, but I doubt anyone would even try to read 50MB page-image PDF facsimiles on a Kindle. (On the Nook Color it might be practical; grab something 1875-ish from Google Books and let me know!) A better suggestion might be to require an up-front payment from publishers for posting anything either fully in the public domain or significantly derived from the public domain. That would cut down on bothouse publications and allow people like me to genuinely add value to public domain material without drowning in unmodifed or barely modified PD books. I’d think $25 would be about right. My books would earn that back in a month or six weeks, and the bothouses couldn’t justify it.
It’s not often that I’d willingly ask to have my own costs raised, but publishing has always been a weird business, and sometimes, well, free is less than worthless.
