From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 08:01:49 -0400

To remind:  I lost my long-in-public-domain "Google Books" (e.g.
Moby-Dick) when I updated the "Play" app in Singapore; discovered that
Google imposes the most restrictive copyright interpretation in the
galaxy; when the issue got a little play on visible blogs, Google
wrote to me to say there was a bug and they were working on it.

I've heard nothing from Google.  Meanwhile, I'm back in the USA a week
now and am still struggling.  The books will all download, but it
seems clear now that a part of this problem is that the app itself is
broken.  Reviews of the recent update of the app on the App Store are
distributed towards the low end of the scale (9 5s, 8 4s, 6 3s, 5 2s,
and 32 1s).  The symptom is that it will start downloading books and
after a bit will let me go into the books and read them, but never
actually *finishes* downloading a book.  I have tried leaving the
device turned on and with the Play app foregrounded for extended
periods of time; no luck.  I've locked it and left it overnight (the
condition in which iCloud will do a backup); no luck.  On several
occasions, the app has frozen and gone to a blank screen and responded
to nothing, so I've deleted the app and redownloaded, meaning that I
have to start the book-downloading all over again.  I'm sighingly
resigned now to making the best of it -- books are mostly usable, with
some headaches; but I've also taken the precaution of looking to see
which books I really want and downloading them separately as PDF to my
laptop and storing them securely, against the rainy day when they are
no longer there.

I subject-headed my first note on this "DRM follies" in homage to
their silliness over my habit of traveling to foreign countries; but I
think now the question is one really of what becomes of the
once-touted Google Books project and what confidence one can have in
the corporation's interest in what I will call sustainability.  The
copyright lawsuit was one thing, but I think all agreed that having
large quantities of unmistakably public domain material available,
searchable, etc., was a good thing.  Does Google still agree?  Will
they agree a year or five years from now?

Jim O'Donnell