MemeMachineGo!

In February, I mentioned that the OED's citations for "pirate" as unauthorized publisher go back to 1603.

But I looked up that earliest citation, from Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Year. The cited passage occurs in a foreword "to the reader." It's an entertaining rant; I recommend the whole thing. It's hard to excerpt without doing violence to the whole, but here goes:

Alas, poore wenches (the nine Muses!) how much are you wrongd, to haue such a number of Bastards lying vpo[n] your hands? But turne them out a begging; or if you cannot be rid of their Riming company (as I thinke it will be very hard) then lay your heauie and immortall curse vpon them, that whatsoeuer they weaue (in the motley-loome of their rustie pates) may like a beggers cloake, be full of stolne patches, and yet neuer a patch like one another, that it may be such true lamentable stuffe, that any honest Christian may be sory to see it. Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme: doome them euerlastingly to liue among dunces: let them not once lick their lips at the Thespian bowle, but onely be glad (and thanke Apollo for it too) if hereafter (as hitherto they haue alwayes) they may quench their poeticall thirst with small beere.

I can't be sure I'm following everything in the Elizabethan English (and the Latin) fraught with both contemporary and classical allusions. But it really seems as if it's hack writers whom Dekker is characterizing as Word-pirates. I think it's an early day complaint that idiot readers are consuming trashy bestsellers instead of recognizing his artistic genius, not an early day complaint about IP violators.

An aeon ago, I bought The Bundled Doonesbury, which includes a CD-ROM of all of the strip's first 25 years. I'm pretty sure I tried it on a Windows 95 or 98 machine at the time, found the interface annoying, and gave up on it. It's been a very long time since I've run an instance of either of those OSes, and, for your convenience, the DRM-ed app on the CD doesn't support anything else.

I'm planning to get an e-ink reader some time this summer -- I'm waiting for some of the dust to settle in the price wars. It seems potentially nifty to read the strips there. So I looked into converting the strips into an actually useful format.

Some websearching turned up that a kindly hacker had come to my rescue with a script that converts the image format on the CD to directories of jpegs, which I ought to be able to convert to something readable on any reader out there.

The extra effort is a pain, though; it would have been much moreso without someone having done the hard work already. This, essentially, is why I'm planning to get an e-reader but not any DRM-ed e-books. I don't want to pay extra for the privilege of needing circumlocutions to read my books on different platforms going forward. (Techniques to crack most, maybe all, of currently popular DRM-ed e-book formats can be readily found, but I don't need the bother.)

Night Shade Books and the other publishers of DRM-free science fiction available on WebScription are liable to get a lot more business from me in the near future. (And ManyBooks, but without the payment part.)

As I mentioned, I'm planning to get an e-reader. I thought it'd be neat to make a hardcover book case for it.

The idea of mutilating a book pains me, but I figured I could get over it. That book sitting at the library book sale priced at a nickel isn't doing any other good in the world.

So the very first book I was checking as a candidate because it was a hardcover of about the right size and with a sound binding was a library discard with this bookplate inside the front cover:

Your careful usage of this volume will preserve its value for those who follow you.

Now I feel like a jerk.