[projectaon] Re: Paul Barnett and the Legends novels (Among Other Things)
- From: Simon Osborne <outspaced@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:53:34 +0100
Timothy Pederick wrote:
Thomas Wolmer wrote:
Paul has indeed stopped selling (or giving away, but charging a
distribution fee, as he puts it) the PDFs, so I am removing that part
from the FAQ too.
Well, isn't that interesting? The way they're putting it, it seems they
want to distribute the files for free, only charging a handling cost,
but want to stop other people redistributing the files (for profit,
certainly, possibly banning it altogether).
Isn't that exactly what Project Aon does? (Minus the handling fee, of
course.) It raises an interesting possibility of expanding our library...
I confess I often find the attitude of copyright holders to be bizarre. If
you
want the books distributed, and you don't mind not receiving a fee for them, but
you want to prevent others from selling them . . . *release them for free
download*, surely? That way, there's not even any need to charge a handling fee,
since anyone can download and read them. Joe Dever had the right idea way back
in 1999.
Also, make sure you put a valid E-mail contact and website URL at the front of
the PDF, and then if anyone *is* duped into buying it, they can immediately find
out that the books are actually available for free, and contact the seller/Ebay
about it. That's a good thing about the PA PDFs--they have a Title Page that
covers the project, and also a User License (hyperlinked from the Title Page)
for legal purposes.
Using that logic--that no money actually /needs/ to be exchanged--then yes, PA
could host the Legends series. I'm just not sure whether the author would be
prepared to (essentially) relinquish control of his work to what is admittedly a
bunch of amateurs. Maybe?
Regarding other PA-related projects, I'm slowly working on what I (currently)
consider to be the final non-gamebook PDF--an Atlas of Magnamund, bringing
together all the maps from all the books. Thing is, since the maps for most of
books 17-28 aren't yet scanned, it's only about 2/3 complete. Also, there may be
other b+w maps in the later books that we don't have scans of; I can't quite
remember.
The file is currently here: http://www.projectaon.org/~simon/Magnamund_Atlas.pdf
(approx. 11Mb)
I want to do a bit more restoration to maps 1-4, but I thought I'd get it out
as-is in case people are getting impatient as to what's being worked on. (I
actually have personally-altered versions of maps 1-4 and 7 which actually have
the sea/The Danarg as solid *blue* instead of white, and I think they look
better; I'm not sure if that oversteps the boundaries of acceptable use for
artists' work under the PA License, however, so I haven't included those.)
There's also a problem I plan to fix with Map 9 (The Dungeons of Torgar) where
one of the labels reads: "Moggador Fore". I think I can safely copy 'st' from
one of the other labels (Akamazim ForeST, for example) to fix it.
If there are any maps I've missed, don't hesitate to let me know! And I'll get
around to fixing up maps 1-4 sometime this week. Maybe. Perhaps.
--
Simon Osborne
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