FAQ

How do I get free public domain titles from Google Books?

Free titles are indicated by a "Get Free" button in place of the "Buy Now" button. Barnes & Noble.com has partnered with Google Books to bring you half a million public domain titles for free. Look for these titles throughout the website, as indicated by the icon shown below.

Frequently unanswered questions:

What quality are these books? How are Google verifying the results of OCR'ing old books? Why don't Barnes and Noble make it easy to find and download the thousands of ebooks which _have_ been carefully checked over years by volunteers from Project Gutenberg?

Sounds like a deliberate decision to associate free ebooks with low quality (and an overwhelmingly high quantity of it).

DRM Irony

Hmm, perhaps I'd use this blog thing [more] if the editor had cooler graduated enhancement.

I consider asking why Fictionwise's free ebooks are all "secure" (encrypted) formats.

I search for Cory Doctorows "Little Brother"

head asplode

Well, I'm still using Gmail as my primary account. Heh.

Tuffmail is more geared towards business than personal accounts. I can't switch back to it noew, because my email archive is bigger than my Tuffmail quota. Tuffmail don't provide an automatic way to buy more quota. So I'm waiting for the next tuffmail invoice (I still use the tuffmail _address_, but forwarded to Gmail). At that point I'll ask for more quota, or close my account.

GMail still sucks.

They still require periodic captcha unlocks for IMAP access, and they still don't include an explanation in the error message. Switching my Dad over to GMail IMAP (from the ISP's unreliable account) wasn't an unmitigated success. And he only uses Gmail from a single computer! Normal users should not have to bookmark a such page - which has the stupidly meaningless title "Google Accounts"... /rant.

GMail still works rather well.

If you use the web interface, I'm sure it's more reliable than most ISP accounts.

Plus, it's a cheap way to keep personal mailing list archives. I have a separate GMail account to cope with the fire-hose that is the linux kernel mailing list. For this, I actually use the web interface - I don't actually want to download the text of every message. GMane (no relation to GMail :-p) is great, but it's had some downtime recently, so I prefer to have a personal archive.