Just downloaded about half a gig of texts. I transfered them to my stick drive, something that one of my friends has labeled, “The briefcase of the 21st century.”
I plan to read some of these on the bus trip this weekend to Ithaca on my microtop, a computer that is about 8 inches in size.
These texts are mostly Buddhist commentaries, and I always think of Jack Kerouac when I’m reading this stuff. When he got into it, he wrote Allen Ginsberg many letters about it, including one that was a bibliography. At the end of this nice bibliography (he annotated it as well) he remarks to Ginsberg – hey, dont’ go looking for these books in the New York Public Library because I stole them from there.
Ironic, but close to what I’m doing, except the theft is a bit more ephemeral. I wonder what he would have thought about BitTorrent and all the freely accessible texts on the internet? I do know he probably would have loved the word processor – no more taping together typing pages to write novels.