From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 20:58:07 +0800

Allow me to add three details to my story, which has gotten picked up
on various blogs, eliciting comments three orders of magnitude more
vapid than *anything* EVER posted on liblicense!

1.  The books were not ones I had bought:  they were 19th century
editions of classics scanned by the Google Books project.  The ones I
need for my teaching are the two volumes of an 1884 edition of the
Latin text of Augustine's City of God.  (I covered myself by finding a
non-Google scan of the same volumes on archive.org.)

2.  I have since discovered by framming around that about half a dozen
of the 40 or so titles are in fact downloadable now, but with no
reasonable pattern at all.  Of a three volume set of Middlemarch, it's
letting me have volume 2.  Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature
is just fine and so is Moby-Dick, but not Varieties of Religious
Experience or J.N. Madvig's Adversaria Critica (in three volumes).

3.  The way it caught me was that my iPad signaled that Google Play
wanted to update itself, so I clicked to allow it to do so -- people
keep forgetting to praise the all-wise Steve Jobs for the way we get
to spend zen meditative time with our iPads waiting for the same app
to keep updating itself over and over and over again.  It was in doing
the update that it figured out where I was and zapped the books.  If I
had not done the update, I'm pretty sure I would have escaped ok --
pretty sure, because I've taken them to other non-Google-Play
countries before.

Alex Holtzman is mostly right that no publisher in his right mind
would want to take my book back because I traveled to a non-compliant
country, but bear in mind that I've commented before that it's the
publishers in collaboration with Amazon who refuse to sell me books in
German published in Germany for my Kindle, even though they have no
competing edition or prospect of competing edition on the market
anywhere.

Jim O'Donnell

On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 8:14 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Alex Holzman <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 09:43:57 -0400
>
> Elizabeth,
>
> Whoa!  How did we get from Apple i-Pad and Google Books to blaming
> this on protecting publishers' investments?  I can't think of a single
> publisher who would want Jim's or anyone else's books to disappear
> from their reader just because they downloaded an app in a foreign
> country that then required re-loading of their books.  Whether Google
> Books is licensed to do business in a specific country also has
> nothing to do with publishers.  (Whether a specific publisher's
> version of a book is available overseas can depend on whether it has
> licensed English-language rights in that country, something I view as
> a bad idea for ebooks, but that's a different issue and not relevant
> here.)
>
> By all means, blame us when we do something wrong, but in this case
> protecting publishers' investments had nothing to do with Jim's
> frustrating experience.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alex Holzman
> Director, Temple Univ. Press
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 8:41 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: "Elizabeth E. Kirk" <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 13:30:45 +0000
>>
>> Fun, no? And try buying a Kindle title from amazon.fr. You can't.
>> I am stymied at how this protects publishers' investments if you
>> can't buy their books.
>>
>>
>> Elizabeth E. Kirk
>> Associate Librarian for Information Resources
>> Dartmouth College Library
>> Hanover, NH, USA
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>
>> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 19:55:41 +0800
>>
>> I'm in Singapore attending the IFLA meetings.  Long trip, but I made a
>> bold and brave decision to depend for my reading material on this trip
>> entirely on my iPad -- Kindle, iBooks, and "Google Play" (formerly
>> known as Google Books).  A single slim volume of Shakespeare's Sonnets
>> accompanies me in codex form to give me something to read during the
>> ritual shutdown of electronic devices on the planes.
>>
>> So when I got here, I noticed that several of my iPad apps had updates
>> on offer, so I clicked and approved.  One of them was Google Play.
>> When it finished and I went to open the app, it told me that it needed
>> to update my book files and this might take several minutes.  Time
>> passed and the screen filled in the covers of the 30 or 40 titles I
>> keep live on the machine.  Two of them were books I am actively
>> reading for my teaching this fall.
>>
>> But all of my books had un-downloaded and needed to be downloaded
>> again.  The app is an inefficient downloader, almost as bad as the New
>> Yorker app, so I dreaded this, but clicked on the two I needed most at
>> once.  (I checked the amount of storage used, and indeed the files
>> really have gone off my tablet.)
>>
>> And it balked.  It turns out that because I am not in a country where
>> Google Books is an approved enterprise (which encompasses most of the
>> countries on the planet), I cannot download.  Local wisdom among the
>> wizards here speculates that the undownloading occurred when the
>> update noted that I was outside the US borders and so intervened.
>>
>> Atypically, Google has Google Play help service available by email,
>> but a series of exchanges demonstrated that the droids at the Android
>> Store were neither able to comprehend my issue, sympathize with my
>> plight, or offer a remedy.  I must return to the US to be allowed to
>> spend a few hours redownloading "my" books before I can read them
>> again.   At one point they asked what features I might suggest be
>> added to Google Play.  I suggested "Don't Be Evil", but got no
>> response.
>>
>> Fortunately, archive.org had a non-Google scan of the 19th century
>> book I needed most; it downloaded just fine and I'm reading it in
>> GoodReader, which appears not to care what country I am in.
>>
>> Jim O'Donnell
>> Georgetown