[conspire] road trip

[Akkana Peck]

> Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):
> > Before your coming trip you might want to get a copy of Roadside
> > Geology of Nevada
> > https://www.powells.com/searchresults?keyword=roadside+geology+of+nevada 

Rick Moen writes:
> If you want cheap amusement, search for electronic formats of that
> book.  You'll find a huge selection of bushwah availability claims from
> some of the Internet's lying liars who lie, wanting to sign you up for
> free trials to subscription services.  Although someone, somewhere,
> might have scanned & OCRed this volume, it has only officially ever been
> released in large-format, 6"x9" paperback, from Mountain Press,
> published 2017, 416 pages.

I've wanted electronic copies of that series forever. I have a set
of them on my shelf, but I always forget to pack the geology books
when going on a trip, and then end up wishing I had them.

In 2020 when the Internet Archive briefly offered borrowing
privileges (in Adobe DRMed format, sadly) for scanned books in
their archive, they had some of the Roadside Geology series.
I don't know if Nevada was one of them. Their scans/OCRs varied
a lot in quality; some were quite readable, some were pretty bad.

But of course Big Publishing went after them, and they backed down
and stopped offering the library. I originally thought the issue was
that they had been offering an unlimited number of borrows (as
opposed to your local library, which has a fixed number of copies of
a particular ebook and if the copies are all checked out, you have
to wait), and that they'd be able to continue to offer borrows with
a waiting list; but I guess it went deeper than that, because every
time I've searched for a book there since then, they've only offered
"read online in a browser using our awkward javascript interface".

        ...Akkana