Useful books and journals online

[ppppenguin]

Many of us know the invaluable American Radio History site. There are high quality scans (with OCR and hence searchable) of huge numbers of publications. Including Wireless World Practical TV etc. They have various books inlcuding several volumes of Briggs' history of the BBC. One omission is Pawley's hisotry of BBC engineering. The BBC have made this available online. Scanned with OCR: https://bbcbrandingrequests.co.uk/histor...Pawley.pdf

Paper copies are not cheap - I think I paid £30 for mine a few years ago and that was a good price then. It's actually more useful as a PDF with OCR because it's searchable.

[ppppenguin]

There's an interesting article by Pawley on p29 here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/archi...ing_92.pdf published, I think, just before his book. There's also a nice article about the first 5 years of the BBC.

PS: Just looked at price of paper copies of Pawley's bok and the cheapest I saw on Abebooks was £34.

[Alistair D]

Jeffrey, or anyone else, do you have a preferred list of bookshops you search?

Al

[peter scott]

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/?AID=5435717&PID=1457557&SID=2

https://www.bookfinder.com/

[ppppenguin]

I think Abebooks is owned by Amazon and shows the same search results. Bookfinder, as mentioned by Peter, looks like it scrapes the resutls from a number of sites including Abebooks and Amazon.

[Mike Watterson]

Goodreads, CreateSpace, Book Depository, AbeBooks, IMDB, Audible (audio books) and too many other things owned by Amazon. They have over 80% of USA online paper sales of books and over 90% of worldwide eBooks. Audio books has 22% growth and dominated by Amazon.
They are not evil and immoral in the sense that Alphabet/Google and Facebook are. But as with most US corporations, insufficiently regulated. They legitimately avoided profit and thus tax for many years by building up AWS (Cloud services etc), such that it had I think 25 Billion revenue in 2018. It's more profitable than any retail organisation, so much so that Amazon's own retail is like small change beside AWS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_me..._by_Amazon

Order from your local bookshop unless it's an eBook. The second biggest eBook after Amazon might only be 5% of sales! Smashwords.com supplies Apple, Barns & Noble, Kobo, Libraries. Don't get books from Google Books/Playstore as piracy is rife.

Alphabet/Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_me...y_Alphabet The two founders are really three. No garage Rags to Riches. Eric Schmitt is the guiding force and financed the start. Needs broken up. Android was bought in. Google Chrome, Chromebook, Analytics, Google Location services, Gmail, Maps, Youtube are all Alphabet spyware.

Facebook (Whatsapp, Instagram) started as a site for people to rate girls at Harvard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_me...y_Facebook It should simply shut down. Only exists to harvest personal data and sell adverts using the lie that personalisation makes it so much better than TV, Radio, paper, bill boards.

Facebook & Google control over 80% of Internet adverts.

[BusyBee]

Facebook  (Whatsapp, Instagram) started as a site for people to rate girls at Harvard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_me...y_Facebook It should simply shut down. Only exists to harvest personal data and sell adverts using the lie that personalisation makes it so  much better than TV, Radio, paper, bill boards.

Facebook & Google control over 80% of Internet adverts.

While agreeing with you on the harvesting of personal data I personally find that there is a wealth of ideas out there that forums such as this can sometimes be (implicitly) very dismissive of. I know there are a non Uk based members here but Facebook tends to be more global. If one is prepared to sift through obvious, and somtimes less than obvious, duff ideas there are gems to find. I prefer to keep options open and look around as I never know where the next idea is going to spring from.

Tracy