That's definitely not the case. Available Light is currently $11.99, but my order has a price of $8.99 (spoiler'd due to image size): Spoiler: Big Image Spoiler: Big Image It's the same with my other orders as well: Spoiler: Big Image With the move to trades, and the increase in price, I'm glad I moved to ebooks for my Trek a long while ago.
All of the e-books released under the title Star Trek: S.C.E. have been collected in print volumes (the last 6 of which are under the rebranded Corps of Engineers banner). The last eight installments that were originally released as Corps of Engineers remain uncollected. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Starfleet_Corps_of_Engineers#Novels
Thanks for the update. I haven't looked up the SCE books in a while. They're probably 3rd in line for me after Mere Anarchy and the Gorkon books. I still have a couple old, old books to get to. I think I still need one or two of the James Blish adaptations and I need a couple of the Logs from the 70's. I used to have a list of books I needed but lost it so I'll have to make up a new one because I think there are a few Pocketbooks odds and ends to get as well. I used to go to Harrisburg for work periodically and there was a great used book store across the river I loved to go to because they had a lot of old Star Trek books for sale. I got many of my older books there. It's also where I got my first printing copy of The Making of Star Trek and I got a couple first printings of the old Bantam Books and even 2 or 3 first LOG printings as well. It was a gold mine of a store.
The following Starfleet Corps of Engineers stories are in print form, as well as eBook: Book 1: Have Tech Will Travel (mass market, containing four eBooks) Book 2: Miracle Workers (ditto) Book 3: Some Assembly Required (ditto) Book 4: No Surrender (ditto) Book 5: Foundations (mass market, containing three eBooks) Book 6: Wildfire (mass market, containing five eBooks) Book 7: Breakdowns (mass market, containing four eBooks) Book 8: Aftermath (trade, containing eight eBooks) Book 9: Grand Designs (trade, containing six eBooks) Book 10: Creative Couplings (trade, containing seven eBooks) Book 11: Wounds (trade, containing seven eBooks) Book 12: Out of the Cocoon (trade, containing four eBooks) Book 13: What's Past (trade, containing six eBooks) Books 1-7 in mass market are branded as Star Trek: S.C.E., while Books 8-13 in trade are branded as Star Trek: Corps of Engineers. The following eight eBooks have yet to be collected into an omnibus: Turn the Page by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore Troubleshooting by Robert Greenberger The Light by Jeff D. Jacques The Art of the Comeback by Glenn Greenberg Signs from Heaven by Phaedra M. Weldon Ghost by Ilsa J. Bick Remembrance of Things Past Books 1 & 2 by Terri Osborne
The Microsoft thing seems to be an extreme case, I've been buying e-books and digital comics for years, and I've never lost access to any of them. There have been a few that are no long available from the store where I bought them, but I still have access to them.
You're lucky. The Microsoft case is actually one of the better ones, because they're giving refunds. Customers of Amazon's first attempt at ebooks (c. 2003), or Mobipocket, or PeanutPress/eReader.com, among others, weren't so lucky. (There's also been a handful of retailers that closed that offered a migration to another store - Borders, Sony, Fictionwise. But that's been the exception and not the rule in my experience.)
One of the reasons I chose the Barnes & Noble Nook over the Amazon Kindle is that the B&N Nook e-store sells books in the ePub format, which can be read on a wide variety of other devices and using other non-Nook software. I download the files of the books I purchase onto my PC or other storage device, and change the file name to the books title and author, without changing the format. (Although I'm way behind on this project at the moment.) So theoretically, even if B&N goes out of business, or even just shuts down their Nook support, I could still open those ePub files using any number of other software packages without relying on their servers. On the other hand, as much as I use Amazon's services, I was never going to get stuck with useless piles of data if they stop supporting their proprietary e-reader software (KPF); never going to have a book disappear from my device because a license somewhere expired. It's the same reason I buy very little (music, books, video) from iTunes. I don't want to be locked into their ecosystem, subject to Apple's whims. I don't trust these large corporations to make decisions to my benefit. And that includes B&N; that's why I'm hedging my bets the best I can.
My biggest complaint with ebooks is that the buyer doesn’t really own it. The buyer has purchased a license to consume the content in whatever way the seller chooses to let you. When I buy a dead tree book, I can sell it on if I choose to. With ebooks, I can’t. I used to love browsing used bookstores, where I could buy recycled paperbacks for a quarter (it was a long time ago...) That’s impossible with an ebook. Plus, I’m one of those unlucky people who chose the wrong ebook formats back in 2000, so my first couple dozen ebooks became unreadable when Adobe and Microsoft stopped supporting their respective ebook formats. Thanks to Calibre, they can’t steal the books I pay for again.
Those are some of the reasons I prefer hardcopy anything over electronic. Now in my case I keep all my books. But I'm sort of a collector, and I guess you'd say a completist. But I also like that I can go back and re-read some of my old books without fear that someday they may disappear or just become unreadable. My copy of "Chain of Attack" will always be on my bookshelf ready for me to read whenever I want. Now if e-book is the only format for a story, I'll get it. And Christopher made a good point about libraries that loan out e-books...in that case you only have it temporarily anyway and it's a great convenience in that you don't have to physically take it back to the library when you are done. I know this is a bigger problem with downloadable music, and especially online TV content. As more companies like Netflix add more original content they are dropping other shows. And now people are running into an issue where they have to have numerous subscriptions to get what they want. Some day they predict people will be paying as much for online content as they would for cable/satellite. Me, I'm old school. I still have cable (gasp), and CD's, and books. Fortunately if a show is good enough it will be released on Blu-Ray and/or DVD. And I guess I prefer older shows. I really don't watch many new shows these days. And movies to (though there are some franchises and directors I always seek out when released like James Bond, Paul Thomas Anderson, M Night Shyamalan, etc.). And with shows like Discovery I know they will come out on Blu-Ray within a few months. It just means I have to be patient and wait a few months for it to come out on Blu-Ray.
Were any other devices released that supported the Barnes & Noble DRM, though? It's a good idea in theory, but I'm not sure how practical it actually is. (Well, was. B&N removed the download links from their website a few years ago, and broke downloads in Nook for PC a few months ago. Now you can only download books directly to a Nook device or app. Getting the files out of those is... not trivial.) I think you're going to end up having to remove the DRM anyways, in which case, the choice between Barnes & Noble and Amazon is six of one, half-dozen of the other.
Back up your files locally onto an external HDD and rename each one slightly (put a fullstop at the beginning of the file) and you'll be fine. Or do a batch conversion of the files in question.
Busy day around here. Just Pre-ordered : The Captains Oath By Christopher L. Bennett The Enterprise War By John Jackson Miller The Antares Maelstrom By Greg Cox Collateral Damage By David Mack Expecting Dayton Wards Available Light to ship any day now. Good things coming. ;-)
Interesting. As I indicated, I'm way behind in downloading, so I wasn't aware that the download links had gone away. That's annoying. I'll need to go mess with the Nook for PC app, plus the downloaded files I have. I don't remember now what software packages I used to open the files, but I don't remember having an issue w/ DRM. But it has been a long time, so I may be misremembering. Thanks for the heads-up!
I love physical books, too, but my book-reading family is flat out of shelf space. As a teen, I joined the SF Book Club, lovingly covering the dust jackets with library-grade clear book covers, spending hours arranging and cataloguing the books on my shelves. But 30+ years later, I had to make the hard decision to buy most of my new books in electronic form. Physical purchases are usually only large-format books, like art books, RPG manuals, heraldry texts -- art-heavy books that often have double-page spreads that don't work very well (for me, at least) in electronic form. For the moment, I also still have physical CDs, DVDs, and BluRay discs, so I can still listen and watch, even when the internet is slow as molasses. Or licenses abruptly come to an end.
So I have been somewhat out of the loop these past few months, what is the current status of Treklit? Has the current novelverse gone away or does it still exist?