#accessible books

[walks-the-ages]

Look what i found on the archive!!!!!!!

Someone uploaded it only a day or two ago 👀👀👀👀👀👀

Faction Paradox fans and those who want to get into it-- check this out!

[prawnlegs]

today I learned about "thumb book holders" in my search for ways to read giant fantasy paperbacks without injuring myself, and then I realized I could make one out of the 20-year-old polymer clay that I had lying around... so I did. and god DAMN it's more effective than I ever expected, so I thought everyone should know about them. You can get really cheap mass-produced ones but this was fun to make and I'll probably make more ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

[botanyshitposts]

public libraries are so crazy man. like you’re telling me I can read this book for free

[macmanx]

[destielmemenews]

"Publishers accused the nonprofit of infringing copyrights in 127 books from authors like Malcolm Gladwell, C.S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J.D. Salinger and Elie Wiesel, by making the books freely available through its Free Digital Library.

The archive, which hosts more than 3.2 million copies of copyrighted books on its website, contended that the library was transformative because it made lending more convenient and served the public interest by promoting "access to knowledge.""

source 1

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[giantkillerjack]

Me: hm, I want something to put on the TV as background noise... Huh. Looks like YouTube is recommending something called The Last Unicorn. That's perfect, it's probably some old shitty animation that has aged poorly! I can watch it ironically!

Me, 2 hours later as the credits roll: *crying, cheering, buying the book, composing the songs*

Me, 2 weeks later: So I have compiled all of the quotes from the book that I think could make good tattoos, and also, HOW HAVE I NEVER LEARNED ABOUT HOW THE LAST UNICORN FUCKING SLAPS??? This gay-ass little fairytale fed my soul! Watered my crops! Transed my gender! Can't believe I heard of this story from youtube recommendations, of all places!!

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

[tehriz]

i live in the eternal yet apparently vain hope that people on this webbed site will actually fucking read the details of the internet archive case and the very specific things they were doing that the publishers were objecting to

nobody ever asked to have the entire archive shut down and millions of books on the site were unaffected and always available throughout, the lawsuit was about the scanning and unlimited distribution of recent books in print still under copyright

(and frankly as someone who cares about the very important work the archive does do i was disappointed as hell that they chose to jeopardize that work with this shit that was pretty unambiguously blatant copyright violation any way you sliced it)

but considering the endless facile and self-serving justifications that come up here on the daily for book piracy when the living authors of those books can’t afford health insurance i don’t know why i’m ever surprised

[burningvelvet]

if the significance of the internet archive being threatened has been lost on anyone, maybe these quick comparisons will put it into perspective…

Banning the Internet Archive would be the equivalent of burning the Library of Alexandria hundreds of times…

[Image Descriptions in alt text]

[14dayswithyou]

Where are we sitting, angels? ✈️

[ckret2]

y'all see the hot new the book of bill preview?

[hedgehog-moss]

hi! i’ve been following you for years, silently in awe of the bright & fulfilling life you’ve built for yourself, and wishing that i could do the same. in between all the charming stories about pandolf & pampe & pirlouit i’ve been noting all your experiences with fence building and foraging and whatnot, in the hopes of putting them to use one day. and that day is today !! today i head out to spend the first night at my little cabin, a long-abandoned seter from the late 19th century, so right now life will be very much like camping with a roof. a lot of work to be done, and it will be a while before i can support animal friends in addition to myself, but i just wanted to say thank you for sharing your life with us! it’s been an invaluable resource + source of inspiration for me :))

Oh that's amazing!! I'm so happy for you 😊 I wish I could send you a housewarming gift (might I interest you in a gremlin cup?)

Your "camping with a roof" comment reminds me of my first spring & summer here, when there was nothing in my kitchen except a table with a small backpacking stove and I had no means of heating the house so I made a fire in the wood oven at night and had to compete with the cats to sit in the 1 square metre of warmth right next to it. They're good memories too, so I hope you enjoy these early days of getting to know your home and working on it <3

I wish you all the best, and especially that you get to feel the "brooding sense of peace and of possession" described by Kenneth Grahame in this quote about a dream home:

First, there would be a sense of snugness, of cushioned comfort, of home-coming. Next, a gradual awakening to consciousness in a certain little room, very dear and familiar [...]: solitary, the world walled out, but full of a brooding sense of peace and of possession. [...] I was there already, ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the world, the lamp lit, the fire glowing ruddily. [A]lways the same feeling of a home-coming, of the world shut out, of the ideal encasement. On the shelves were a few books—a very few—but just the editions I had sighed for […]. On the walls were a print or two, a woodcut, an etching—not many. […] All was modest [...] but all was my very own, and, what was more, everything in that room was exactly right.

[bethanydelleman]

Edit: Turning off reblogs on this post since I've been told it contains misinformation. Also, someone reblogged it with a huge rant and blocked me (as far as I can tell), leaving me unable to reply and with only partial notes and that freaks me out.

So I was telling someone about my boy, Sejong the Great of Joeson, who deserves that title "great" since he was so concerned about illiteracy that he created the easy-to-learn Korean alphabet (Hangul) by himself, but then the nobility got mad about all these reading peasants and tried to ban it. And my friend says, "Oh, I thought illiterate poor people in the past were just lazy."

And I was like, "No, no, you don't want your indentured servants and peasants reading and figuring out how much you are screwing them over. The adapted Chinese characters that Korea had been using took years to learn so it was a natural gatekeeper of knowledge."

And then, because one must be fair, I went on to explain how Europeans locked up their knowledge behind Latin, especially the Bible, and how it was so important that Martin Luther translated it into everyday German, because once you can read the Bible yourself, you can challenge the almost absolute power of the church. Only the rich could afford to learn Latin, so only the rich could read the book that their entire society was allegedly based around.

I do think things are much better today, but why are most scientific papers paywalled and scientists sometimes act as if they should be treated like infallible priests...

Edit: I wanted to end this post on a happy note, but then I started thinking about paywalls and it made me a bit depressed. We still do make our best knowledge less accessible to the average person and I hope we can do more to change that.

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[sweatersexual]

This man was going to attend medical school