The Book of Shen
9 points by veqq
9 points by veqq
I think this is probably the most tedious way to read an online text I’ve ever encountered. There’s something to be said here about the UNIX philosophy and how accessible it is to users, comparatively speaking. Because all along, this was the alternative (you can’t see the face that I’m making, but it’s surprised disgust).
Here’s an interesting hypothetical(!) question: Given that the entire contents of the book are freely available online, at what point does downloading a copy from libgen become piracy? I suspect that legally it’s still piracy and you’d have to actually email the copyright holder, but I also wonder how that would hold up in court given the entire book is already online. I guess it might fall under “is making a backup of this website and transforming it into an easier read copy as a derivative work for accessibility reasons illegal” and I suspect the answer is probably “yes”.
Although I mean technically my computer is already downloading the images and storing them on disk in a cache? So I bet that technically that counts as a derivative work, and nobody really cares about that.
And again, to be clear, these are just hypotheticals.
I am also perplexed at the decision to have a table of contents where the titles of chapters cannot be clicked, only the roman numerals at the end; which takes up a column on the right at the top level, but is replaced by a column of the same size but with only previous/next/top buttons….
Actually, all of it. If someone wants their ideas to remain in obscurity, they should be allowed to do that.
Has a non-image version been created?