David Moynihan’s silly little jihad goes on against TeleRead. We’re an advocacy site about ideas, such as the goal of well-stocked national digital libraries in the States and elsewhere; and yet Moynihan is scolding us for not digitizing books ourselves.
“You’ve never lived on a frontier, have you?” David has written me. “Hence your distaste for labor…” Apparently I must take time out to skin Grizzly bears or maybe build a hard drive from scratch.
David M’s blog, too, suggests that he’s beaming in from, if not remotest Alaska, then maybe Pluto. No, eBookWeb isn’t a do-nothing waste–it contains many viewpoints and is a must-read for people in e-bookdom. I’m delighted to see some corporate sponsors and grassroots folk donate, even though I doubt that Glenn Sanders is growing rich. And TeleRead? Been at it for more than a decade without pay for me or those who’ve helped. Hey, I wouldn’t mind a grant, but, like Project Gutenberg, I worry about the strings.
What’s more, to addresss another Moynihanism, I love the Online Books Page, and TeleRead has linked to it. But the Page is not a TeleRead-style library with full archiving and provisions for paying contemporary writers. The Online Books Page to a great extent lives on the kindness of strangers–other sites. If the links at the other end vanish, then so does access to the books via the Page. Similarly there is no guarantee that Moynihan’s Blackmask Online will always be around, considering his extremely high chance of being murdered by a smeared foe who is more into physical labor than I am.
As for Moynihan contributing articles to this TeleBlog, I did invite him at one point because I thought we’d have some overlapping interests despite his contrary views. Now I’m not sure, given his lie-to-fact ratio. We’re deep in wacko territory here. No comparison of literary talents intended, or Nazi accusations; but you might say he’s the Ezra Pound of e-book bloggers, if not the Joseph Goebbels.
What’s amusing is that Moynihan, while trying to downplay TeleRead’s influence, has bothered to send me thousands of words of hate mail. No real dialogue actually sought by him. Just a chance to spew out crackpot-style venom. I’ve set Eudora to filter him to the aptly named Trash folder.
This could be an act of cruelty since I know the guy feels lonely without a good fight and wants to provoke the same among others. Moynihan even keeps trying to depict TeleRead as a competitor to Project Gutenberg when actually Greg Newby, Michael Hart’s second in charge, was the one who recruited me to do a TeleRead chapter for an MIT Press/ASIS book on the future of electronic publishing. TeleRead itself has repeatedly praised Project Gutenberg. PG is more fragile than you’d think, by the way. Michael Hart, though quite health minded, isn’t immortal, and he of all people wants to see his work go on. And yet corporate America has hardly been generous to either the cause or the man, at least in terms of paying him to do his thing without compromise. I myself have tried, in vain so far, to get some hardware companies to help out Project Gutenberg–which would really be a favor to them, too, given the value that his free and legal content would add to their products.
Under TeleRead, money could be available for grassroots Gutenberg-style efforts to augment the work of professional librarians. David Moynihan’s site also offers a good preview of the possibilities here. Within Blackmask Online, I found some wonderful junky sci-fi from 19th century Canada–the very stuff that might or might not past the muster of the usual suspects, but is fascinating as a reflection of the era in which it is written. We need more of this, from Gutenberg, from Moynihan, and, hopefully in time, from TeleRead.gov. Here’s to a variety of profit-driven, philanthropic and tax-supported approaches, as opposed to a mean-spirited “either or”!
In fact, I’ll still recommend David M’s site–even his blog, if you enjoy highly surrealistic fiction. He’s uploaded thousands of e-books, and I doubt that his personal lunacy will alter the wording of Dickens or my unfashionable favorite, Sinclair Lewis.
Well, enough on Mr. Blackmask.com for the moment. I’m sure that the lonely David M would love this exchange to continue, but why humor him right now when taking on Fritz Hollings and Jack Valenti is a lot more fun and certainly far more useful for public-domain endeavors like Project Gutenberg? Meanwhile a big welcome to anyone following the links from the Moynihan tirade to TeleRead.org. Enjoy both our sites–and Gutenberg, too.
