Hi gang, I appreciate your penultimate efforts. And I hope you'll take that honestly.
Black Mask is about to exit the CD-ROM business. I'm not going anywhere, but I won't be selling CD anthologies anymore (may keep DVDs, but depends on the outcome of this conversation.)
Of course, the disks I've made 'til now have value. Honestly. Trust me. People want them. So I figured the best thing to do would be to let the public (or their geek friends!!!!) download ISOs and burn a disk or 50, giving to their dads, their school, or hoarding, whatever... ain't the public domain great?
Greg Newby has been kind enough to let me start uploading my former "one category" disks today... so there'll be Nautical (plus some non-PG Melville), Marryat (plus a LOT!), etc., as well as Elizabethans, Trollope, and that Action thing I obsessed on for a while when I read about schools not having any books for boys at all...
I will never again attempt to sell these disks (though if others want to, they are more than welcome... also, PG vols could add Canadian, Australian, pre-Naturalist 19th Century American, etc.... if you can find the time... again, people want them... I kept wanting to do an Irish Renaissance disk, but Charles Franks and Co. kept having one more by Lady Gregory in "silver.")
There's a problem here. The copyright. I'm sorry. I was really just messing with other websites there, most of which are gone now (been doing this five years, and I demand credit for driving bibliomania insane, but I suppose there were few other notable achievements). I never in any way wanted to alienate PG staffers, and I've since changed my "copyright logo" to indicate "formatted" Blackmask Online (year x).
The copyright notice was particularly stupid in that, well, it hardly stopped ebayer X from reselling... so why annoy you?
Anyway, I wanted to offer PG all my "by category" disks... complete with files... but that's really not what I wanted to offer.
Ideally, I'll be giving PG (as ISOs and "files" behing the ISOs) all my books. Period. Bar none, save for a few author-donated (translator Frank Morlock) or pulps (where, ahem, well for the most part I'm past the statute of limitations, so what are you gonna do, Conde Nast?)
That's 6 sets of disks (Vol. 1-6) and a lot of books... but I know, the copyright notice. PG'll have their own Readme at the start of every book (and there's a platform-independent search engine), but still, like it or not, a copyright notice.
Again, I won't be selling.
So I want to ask PG volunteers, is that copyright notice OK? We can search and replace most of it, but that may not be enough (particularly for MS-Reader).
Option B is ISO hosting offered through Brewster Kahle's (and Larry Lessig's) Internet Archive, but they'd mirror anything PG... so, would you guys like the Blackmask CDs, Vol. 1-6 (and 7, 8, 9... forever?)
Want to see lots of comments... from both sides!
David Moynihan
http://www.blackmask.com