The perils of obtaining books….

 

Here at this link is the ultimate tease for this already whining, snivelling book-seeker who has been buying books all over recently and whose purse is becoming sadly threadbare. And whose house is running out of space for accommodating my endless lust for more books!

This particular volume is expensive (natch, all the books I want seem to be expensive)….BUT (a glimmer of hope) it has a hefty sample available on Google Books. Ah, but then comes Nemesis! All the pages I want to see are “not available”. Howls of disbelief!!!!!! Why those pages in particular? Why not a part of the book that doesn’t interest me? It’s a conspiracy!

Well, I did find the entire book on line….at a site that gives McAfee the habdabs. It’s somewhere of rather suspicious Russian origin. So I chickened out of risking it. I’ll just have to sit here and fester about life’s little injustices.

But before anyone says it serves me right because I shouldn’t be trying to get something for nothing and thus prevent the author from receiving well-earned royalties, let me point out that as an author myself, with a substantial backlist stretching over forty years or more, I’ve suffered from a lot of pirating (not saying Google Books are pirates, by the way – I’m talking about sites that put out entire books “for free”!) Publishers try to stop it, but the pirates only pop up somewhere else. Like pulling up weeds and hoping they won’t come back. A losing battle during which I eventually waved the white flag.

So yes, I was hoping to find the above book in its entirety. I admit to the sin.