Re: (review) The Flowers of Vashnoi by Lois McMaster Bujold

On Apr 1, 2025, Lynn McGuire wrote
(in article <vshkjo$1pkr$1@dont-email.me>):

On 4/1/2025 2:27 PM, Tony Nance wrote:

On 3/27/25 9:39 AM, James Nicoll wrote:

The Flowers of Vashnoi by Lois McMaster Bujold
>
Efforts to decontaminate a radioactive zone on Barrayar produce
an entirely unexpected discovery.
>
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/yonder-stands-your-orphan

>
I spend enough of my work time reading a screen that I don't enjoy
reading for pleasure on one. But works like this one -- not available on
paper to this point -- make me sorely tempted to put up with it anyway.
>
Tony

>
Ebooks are slowly killing all of the deadtree reprints. I hate ebooks.
>
Lynn

I have stopped buying dead tree books except where I have no choice, and the
number of books I want which are not available as ebooks is dwindling.
Further, because a lot of my library is ‘out of print’ I have been
scanning, OCRing, and ripping to EPUB a lot of my existing dead tree books. I
have also been deDRMing as many ebooks as possible. Note that some ebooks are
of very low quality; Amazon in particular screws up many history and
technical books, messing with illustrations, maps, diagrams and more. On
several occasions I have had to buy a dead tree edition specifically to get
the correct layout and then to scan and OCR it, with illustrations etc. in
the correct places, because Amazon was too damn lazy to do it right. For
example the Kindle version of James McPherson’s excellent The Battle Cry of
Freedom messes up the illustrations, despite being very not cheap. The
cheaper Kindle editions of several books are repleat with OCR errors. One of
the things I do when deDRMing a book is to run through it and correct the OCR
errors. There are several reasons why I don’t buy many Amazon books any
more.