The book is available! Well, sort of.
Aug. 5th, 2022 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Readers who would like to get 104,000 words (counting references) of my highly opinionated opinions all at once can now obtain an eBook version of Planning the Next Great Migration for 99 cents from the Amazon Kindle store here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B8T9F8BX/ref=sr_1_1
I recognize that this solution has many imperfections. Most importantly, you must have a Kindle to read it, and I don’t have a Kindle, because I loathe those revolting little gadgets. But a lot of people do have them, and I felt a sense of urgency to start trying to get my message out the fastest way I could, because even though I’m something of a doomer, these days, bad things always seem to happen faster than I think they will.
It could not be made available free through Amazon (Bezos ain’t running a charity here, he’s got a lot of alimony to pay), but it is labeled as Creative Commons-licensed for free noncommercial distribution. The next hoop for me to jump through is creating the files for a paperback print-on-demand version, which may have to wait until I can take a few vacation days, because I believe that anything worth writing is worth printing out on paper. (Whether this was worth writing will ultimately be up to people other than myself; for the moment, leave me my illusions, thanks!) The Kindle version cover could easily be attached to the paperback text PDF to make a freely distributable PDF version, but I do not know of a good free website where I could put that file and provide a permanent link to it. Any suggestions would be welcome.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-07 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-07 03:09 am (UTC)As for your suggestion, I think that would have required me to sign up for Kindle Select, which (while maintained) would have given Amazon exclusive rights to distribute any electronic version. That would minimally have meant that the Creative Commons status and my ability to create a free PDF version would have been right out, and at worst would have meant that they could have come after me if my posts here duplicated too much of the book content. I'm not going to be able to offer a paper version anywhere but Amazon, and I don't want this to be totally unavailable to anyone who doesn't patronize Amazon.
Apparently when their algorithm checks the files for acceptability to Kindle (which happens astonishingly fast) it does not look to see if the author is badmouthing Amazon, which I do at least once. Or maybe they just don't care if you grouse about them as long as you keep buying and selling through them.
Not sure when I can work on a paperback version. I suddenly woke up after two weeks of spending lots of time on this and realized I had real-world deadlines coming at me like a freight train....
no subject
Date: 2022-08-07 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-07 10:57 pm (UTC)Thanks!
Date: 2022-08-08 02:28 am (UTC)