Now, I quite like ebooks. I do most of my reading on my tablet and I have a massive ebook library of which Project Gutenberg is merely the foundation. But I endeavor to obtain a hardcover edition of any book I want to preserve, because I have absolutely zero confidence in ebooks necessarily surviving the coming Dark Age of post-Christianity.
In addition to its relentlessly Orwellian ideological practices, Amazon is already showing the cracks in its core technology that will only be exacerbated over time. I’m not saying one shouldn’t read or collect ebooks, only that it’s important to understand that digital technology is simply not going to survive over time due to its reliance on a technological ecosystem that cannot reasonably be expected to survive.
An outage was preventing Amazon Kindle users from downloading both new and previously purchased books to their e-readers, as noted on Amazon’s support forums and Reddit, but the company says things should be resolved. “Yesterday, some Kindle customers experienced an issue that impacted their ability to download e-books. The issue was quickly resolved,” writes Amazon devices spokesperson Jackie Burke in an email sent to The Verge.
The forum post included many reports of Kindles that were only able to download the title and cover art of books before the progress indicator got stuck at 1 percent. The outage also seemed to affect downloading books from Overdrive to Kindle devices using Libby. However, downloading books to the iOS and Android Amazon Kindle apps is not affected.
This latest issue comes a week after several Kindle users on Reddit reported a problem with Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature, which allows ebooks and documents to be sideloaded onto the e-readers without having to plug them into a computer. Some users received error messages telling them their files “could not be delivered due to a service error,” while other users in the thread were still seeing problems with the service earlier this week.
Later this year, I’m hoping we can unveil some of the first steps toward an actual Castalia library. In the meantime, we continue to collect old books that are worth saving, such as this priceless BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MILITARY BOOKS UP TO 1642 that I acquired a few months ago for less than three dollars, one of only 250 copies that were ever printed in 1900.
This is what your support of Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, and Castalia History is doing, in addition to providing you with some of the most beautiful books in the world for your personal library.