NavList:

   

Reply

Hi guys,

I'm sorry to respond to another email with an off-thread topic, but I
have not yet figured out how to start a new top line thread. (Any quick
hints?)

Most of you probably already know this, but I just purchased a
page-by-page scanned version of the 1851 Bowditch.  It is available for
about $40 or so from www.starpath.com.

I received the CD very quickly (Fedex) and registered it (quite an
involved registration process) and finally got it open.

It is a very high quality product on a PDF file, although the pages
tended to load a bit slowly on my old computer.

The big drawback is that you are NOT allowed to print any part of it --
which caught me by surprise!  (Maybe I'm just behind the times and
everyone else knows this.)

I would have enjoyed reading the 1851 Bowditch very much, and I applaud
the effort Starpath put in to create this and the reasonable pricing.
But I for one am limited in the time I can spend in front of a computer
because of neck injuries.  So this makes computer-read-only products
like this practically useless to me (this is the first time I have
purchased such an item).  With our aging population, physical problems
from working in front of computers for too long must surely be on the
rise?  Does any one else have this problem?  Where does that put those
of us with these disabilities in position vis-a-vis the e-books?

Also, I believe in working methodically through the examples in these
types of books, which requires pencil and calculator notations.  I was
very excited at the prospect of having the ability to print pages with
examples that I could scribble all over and still have the clean text.
(Right now I have to photocopy pages in my Bowditches, Nories, etc. to
do this.)

In any event, the 1851 Bowditch from Starpath appears to be similar
(espeically with regard to the discussion on lunars) to the 1821 and
other editions that I already own straddling the 1851 date.

David Burch at Starpath was very fair and gave me an immediate refund
(and turned off my access code, of course).  He mentioned that new CDs
will clearly warn that the information is not printable.  Looking at the
CD wrapping for the copy I received, I read:

"Exact reporduction of the 1851 edition of The New American Practical
Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch.  Bookmarked and fully searchable."  But
there is nothing to warn about the NO PRINT and it is equally unclear in
the web-page ad. (Interestingly, in the web-page ad Starpath offers to
donate this e-book to any library free of charge, but they can't seem to
figure out a way to offer a printed copy to those of us who are paying
customers with disabilities?)

I hope this will be useful to some of the members.

Regards,
Bill

   

Reply