'The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has launched The Banned Book Club... The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers in locations across the United States where titles have been banned. The e-books will be available to readers for free via the Palace e-reader app.'
Of course Levar Burton wants you to read banned books. Heven Haile sits down with Levar and MoveOn’s Rahna Epting to talk about it.
“When I read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time,” LeVar Burton says, “I couldn’t imagine that situation in my reality. It was a shame, right? Wow. Those poor people in that misguided society. I live in that society now. That dystopian story has become my truth.”
The Sakya Monastery in tibet has a library comprising some 84,000 books. Most are Buddhist scriptures, but there are works of literature, history, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, and art. They date back centuries.
In 2011 they began to digitize the library. All books are indexed and about 20% have been fully digitized.
By default, Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet — whether it’s related to their education or a google search for nearby abortion clinics. Then, their wildly permissive terms of service say they can build profiles on individual students and sell this information to data brokers
And here's another book I’ve just finished, for anyone who has studied (or is studying) maths. It’s a lovely gallop through the parts of mathematical history that we don’t hear about, steering away from the stories that focus on the “Great Men” of the white western world, and digging around in a far more global and diverse view of how mathematics was developed. Especially highly recommended for anyone teaching maths at any level. It’s out in a couple of weeks. #maths#books#history
@helenczerski a perfect stocking stuffer for my sister in law. Thank you. And I just read it also even though I am not a maths person it still sounds fascinating. Sigh. My book list is longer than years I have left nearly. 😂
@helenczerski thanks for recommending the book. The stories it tells of similar concepts appearing in multiple regions of the world at different times, how religion, politics and culture sometimes encouraged exchange and broad participation but also often prevented it, made for a very interesting read.
@davemark as a life long, avid book reader who worked on movies for a career, I was always amazed at how few book sales it took to be a “best seller”, vs. how many folks had to buy tickets to a movie for it not to be considered a “flop”…
In case anyone is wondering if there is any engagement on here— this is the list of every book recommended after I asked if you’d share one book you enjoyed this year. You can scroll underneath the post to see these, but I think seeing them all together shows the true awesomeness of the people on here.
@Likewise@bookstodon I have gotten two jobs because of DIRECT referrals from random people in the Fediverse. Engagement here is way more meaningful than I ever found on the birdplace.
I just learned that libraries cannot purchase #Audible exclusives and I feel absolutely enraged. Then I found Libro.fm thanks to @pluralistic and I learned their #books are #DRM free, yours forever and a local bookstore of your choice receives part of your subscription or purchase. I tried their app and it is nicer, prettier and more user friendly than Audible, so I subscribed and picked #TheInternetCon to help seize the means of Computation ✊
@NatureMC@berniethewordsmith That’s rough; hopefully they’ll eventually grow outside the anglosphere, or something else will fill the void 🤞
Liberating my audiobook library from Audible by downloading them all and stripping the DRM has been extremely rewarding; can finally use a better app and share books easily with my partner 🙄
Whilst the idea of making more audio books available to the general public by having them read by AI-voices, is obviously a good thing, especially for people with sight problems.
I still have 2 big problems with it:
The idea is obviously to replace skilled voice actors' labour with inferior quality machines, which is a problem for the actors and for smaller companies, which try to make a living in the audio book market.
Happy to announce that my next book, tentatively titled "Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media" will be published by Oxford University Press!
Read more about it, and my process of writing the book, here on #FOSSacademic
@nicol@rwg Congrats on the contract! I look forward to reading it.
I think of Interledger as “federated Venmo”. One-time tips, recurring support, and streaming micropayments (aka Web Monetization) can all be accomplished using it. @Interledger is working hard to support financial institutions all over the world in supporting the protocol. It’s a long game, but I expect to see at least 1 launch before the end of the year.
The vision does feel like federated banking, but cheap enough to finally make online micro- & nano- payments viable.
It took a few face-to-face conversations in NOLA before I could trust it really is as decentralised as it sounds, ie there's not a huge centralised ledger/bank/cryptopitch hiding in the background. Most people I speak to about it assume the worst. Decentralized, seamless, agnostic & safe micro-payments just sounds too good to be true!
AHHHHHH the new #Murderbot novel is out today and my preorder just arrived on my Kobo and why didn't I take today off work for #reading?????
If you haven't read any Murderbot by the amazing @marthawells yet this is your wake up call to pick up the first novella (All Systems Red). You'll know within the first chapter if it's not for you or if you're hooked for life and it will almost certainly be the latter.
"I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heart- less killing machine, I was a terrible failure."
~@marthawells
All Systems Red
Why are algorithms called algorithms? A brief history of the Persian polymath you’ve likely never heard of.
Over 1,000 years before the internet and smartphone apps, Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī invented the concept of algorithms.
@petersuber I would imagine the individuals would also have to pay fines or pay for the book they threatened to return and likely lose library privileges. 🙃 They would then have bought the book!
LibriVox - founded in 2005 - is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record public domain texts: poetry, short stories, whole books, even dramatic works, in many different languages. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain in the USA and available as free downloads on the internet. via @internetarchive
#introduction: Hi I’m Farah. I’m originally from a small South Asian country; now live in Iowa, USA. I talk about my hobbies, #books, #gaming, #sciencefiction and #StarTrek and other isssues like #mentalheaIth#science#psychology. Occasionally I’ll talk about #USpolitics. I complain about the world a lot. I am pathologically anxious and make jokes to compensate, they aren’t always funny. Trying to connect with people because it’s hard to make friends in real life. Peace! 🖖🏼
welcome :D 🖖 there's a bunch of us who watch all star trek most nights on Heroes and Icons (not metv, as I initially said), and live tweet about the epsiodes. It's a hoot. Join us on #allstartrek and @startrek
Little libraries are cute and nice, but they are not a replacement for a real library. No amount of books available for pickup can replace the freedom of a public space where no one is trying to sell you something, and the people who work to upkeep that space.
Eric Arthur Blair, English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the name George Orwell died #OTD in 1950. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938) are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. via @wikipedia
@nf3xn@gutenberg_org@wikipedia
Down and Out is just epic. I worked in kitchens for quite a few years in all capacities and it's like a bible for Hospitalities staff. I laughed long and loud, when Eric and his friend made it back from France where things were bad, and got back to England - and it was WORSE! "Dickensian".
