Does this make me a bad person?

[amalthia]

The author obsessed1 was very CLEAR about saying no one has permission to merge her story into a single file or turn it into a PDF or word doc.

Read author notes here

For some reason her statement really made me want to go merge the story, take a screencap of the single file PDF and Word Doc (and ebook versions because no way would I go through the effort without making an ebook version), and email the screencap to her!

I felt like a rather bad person for being so tempted. Because really seriously? It's one thing to not offer a single file version for your readers because it is the author's choice as to how they want to present their fic. It's another thing to give orders to readers on how to read the story.

Um other than that the story actually looks quite interesting. I'll read it once I get it on my ebook reader after converting it to a single file Word doc, then to HTML, and from there epub and LRF.

Can't stop the signal.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I'm really sorry, but I won't be posting a pdf of this. For personal reasons, I choose not to give out copies of my work to anyone not involved in the production process. What's keeping us from saving ourselves copies of the individual pages, I wonder?

Not that I was planning on reading this one anyway, the summary doesn't sound my speed, if all the interchapter links are images without alt text like the links from the masterpost are then I've got problems because I browse with images off, and the images thing is a serious problem for people with screenreaders and the no-single-file thing avoids simplifying life for the same people.

In conclusion, you're not a bad person, and you would in fact be doing people a favor.

[amalthia]

What's keeping us from saving ourselves copies of the individual pages, I wonder?

Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this.

I used DownloadThemAll Firefox extension to download all the chapters. I think all a person has to do is highlight all the images and right click the mouse, however...I don't even know if DownloadThemAll will work with any of the tools blind people use.

I thought it was a bit odd to embed the chapter links to images. The first thing I thought when I didn't see alt text on the images is that anyone using the screen readers (I mean the ones blind people use to navigate a browser) is going to have problems accessing this story. She pretty much made finding the chapters of her story impossible for blind people.

[elf]

Not only is nothing stopping anyone from keeping copies of the individual pages, it happens automatically unless you take great effort to stop it. Pages in your browsing history are usually on your hard drive.

If she wants to reduce the number of copies (not prevent them entirely), she'll need to produce the story as a streaming flash movie.

[amalthia]

I'm trying to visualize how this would work. :)

[auburn]

I browse with images turned off too - I'm on dial up. There are other things people do that in posts that annoy the f--k out of me, but embedding links in images makes my top fifteen. My reaction to the little note was: personal reasons must equal wanting to make life a little more difficult and irritating for anyone who wanted to read the story off-line or with a slow connection or a screen reader.

Happily, I don't read much SPN and no J2, so I'm not done out of reading this, I wouldn't have anyway, but if it had been an intriguing SGA fic? I'd say something nasty under my breath and click away from it. Not worth the effort. The bullshit attitude would be a good alert to the likelihood I wouldn't enjoy the fic anyway.

In other words, you aren't a bad person, something about it was annoying even to someone with no stake in reading or not reading the fic.

[amalthia]

hugs and thanks for the words of support.

I'm extremely happy in Star Trek Reboot fandom at the moment and I think it has to do with the Kirk/Spock Archive. :) One of the biggest things I miss now that I'm not as active in SGA is the Wraithbait archive.

[perfica]

Wow. That's really...precious.

[derryderrydown]

For personal reasons, I choose not to give out copies of my work to anyone not involved in the production process.

If she doesn't want 'anyone not involvedin the production process' to have a copy of her work, she's made the elementary mistake of putting it on the damn internet.

[amalthia]

Yeah, that's my feeling on this as well.

[meri_oddities]

Um...this is a publicly posted story. What people do with it after it's been posted is really up to them. If it interested me, I'd totally downland it and put it into one file for my own use. I probably wouldn't post it anywhere else, though.

[meri_oddities]

I went back and took a second look. I did read it, which means I did download it into one file and put it on my Kindle. *g*

[amalthia]

Yeah, this is why I shake my head when I see these types of requests in the author's notes...does anyone really obey them? I know I don't.

[meri_oddities]

Exactly. Whatever her reasons are, she can't really expect us to listen. I don't read on the computer screen because it strains my eyes. And what about people who have other needs that can't be met by her formatting. I just don't get this.

[ratcreature]

Well, I can understand if someone doesn't want copies archived elsewhere and floating around because they want people to come to their own site. But any unrealistic controlfreakery beyond that makes me eyeroll a lot. Obviously readers have to download the pages to read, and will format and display their copy for their convenience.

[amalthia]

I can understand the no archiving rule too but to tell the readers not to make a single file...yeah that is an eye rolling event for me as well. :)

[dossier]

I'm with you, that is utterly short sighted of the OP.