#ebooks

African American Studies

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Revised and Updated Edition

Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies: Theories and Transgressions

J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings

The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny

African Studies

Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa

Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life

American Indian Studies

Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History

The Urgency of Indigenous Values

Anthropology

Graceful Resistance: How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement

Lacandón Maya in the Twenty-First Century: Indigenous Knowledge and Conservation in Mexico's Tropical Rainforest

Maya-British Conflict at the Edge of the Yucatecan Caste War

Neobugarrón: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice

Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America

Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land

Voices of Indigenuity

Archaeology

Living Ceramics, Storied Ground: A History of African American Archaeology

New Deal Archaeology in the West

The Cretan Collection in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, volume III: Metal Objects from Gournia

Violence and Inequality: An Archaeological History

Architecture

Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos

Asian Studies

Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963–1985

Communication Studies

Covid and…: How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic

Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches: The Promises and Perils of Women's Rhetorical Adaptivity

Influential Machines: The Rhetoric of Computational Performance

Migrant World Making

Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting

Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907

Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives

Cultural Studies

Cultural History of British Alternative Cabaret (1979-1991)

Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect: Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel

Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis

Toward a Gameic World

Development Studies

Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Education

Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland

The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education

Environmental Studies

Ecologies of Imperialism

Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Protests and Land Conflict in Brazil

Feminist & Women's Studies

Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities

Recovering Women’s Past: New Epistemologies, New Ventures

Film Studies

Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors: Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema

Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream

The Rise of Central American Film in the Twenty-First Century

Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity

Food Studies

The Visible Hands That Feed: Responsibility and Growth in the Food Sector

Gender Studies

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940

Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918

History

Captivity's Collections: Natural History and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade

Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization

Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World: 1685-1896

Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi

Language & Literature

Abraham Lincoln and the Bible: A Complete Compendium

Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early American Literary History

Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism

Faking It: Victorian Documentary Novels

Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China

The Lost Texts of Confucius’ Grandson: Guodian, Zisi, and Beyond

Understanding Agatha Christie

Latin American Studies

Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution

Law

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America

Linguistics

Cantonese Since the Nineteenth Century

Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field

Middle East Studies

Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces

Music

Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism

Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson

Lieder in America: On Stages and In Parlors

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone

Peace & Conflict Studies

Remaking the World: Decolonization and the Cold War

The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras

The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

Uniting Against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe

Unwilling to Quit: The Long Unwinding of American Involvement in Vietnam

Performing Arts

Sonic Strategies: Performing Mexico's War on Drugs, Mourning, and Feminicide

Staging Existence: Chekhov's Tetralogy

Philosophy

Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges

Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious: Vol. 2 The Affective Hypothesis

Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis

Political Science

Beyond Othering: A Gandhian Approach to Conflict Resolution in India and Pakistan

Local government and democracy in the United Kingdom

Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece

The Cost of Voting in the American States

The New Star Chamber and Other Essays: Annotated Edition

Population Studies

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century

Psychology

Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe

Public Health

Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1870

Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011

Religion

Christan Colleges and Universities: An Empirical Guide

From Jesus to J-Setting: Religious and Sexual Fluidity among Young Black People

The Hispanic Faculty Experience: Opportunities for Growth and Retention in Christian Colleges and Universities

Science & Technology Studies

Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City

Sociology

Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence

As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity

Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

Research as More Than Extraction: Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies

The Souls of Jewish Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anti-Semitism, and the Color Line

Technology

Transnational Families in Africa: Migrants and the role of Information Communication Technologies

Urban Studies

My friend pointed it out first, and then I started noticing too. Why would books that multiple libraries definitely, 100% had digital access to a couple of months/weeks/days ago disappear?

Amazon is invoking exclusive rights to them.*

Ebooks that the public library once had digital copies of are now only available through Amazon. Audible boasts on their covers about Audible-exclusive audiobooks that did not used to be Audible-exclusive. Entire series and collections are disappearing overnight.

Keep your eyes on the privatization of media and your libraries.

*earlier versions said "getting"; Amazon has likely always had these rights, but in the face of boycotts they're tightening the leash, so to say [source 2] [source 3] [source 4] [source 5] (sources indicate that Amazon is refusing to sell to libraries)

If not, download it to your phone, and under "Add library card" select the button to search for a library and start typing in "queer"...

Sign up with an email, no actual address required, and you are good to go 🏳️‍🌈

[ID: A screenshot of the Queer Liberation Library Libby main page, showing 6 titles, one of which is an audio book. The titles displayed are the Trans Teen Survival Guide; Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next); We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival; Tomboy Survival Guide; A Burst of Light and Other Essays; and Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. End ID]

(thank you @teddypoi-qd for the ID!]

Dammit, there are some definitions of "Science fiction is becoming reality!" that you DON'T want to see.

...So I'm breaking this oldish work of (screenplay) fiction out as a separate ebook. (And I may yet novelize it, as [apparently / seriously annoyingly] it seems its time has come.)

A pair of tourists from the US fly into to London for business and pleasure... and abruptly find themselves drawn into a battle for the freedom of human souls threatened by a new and terrible kind of slavery.  Joy, chafing a little against the current boundaries of her marriage, strikes up an odd friendship with a young man staying in the little B&B that her husband's big company's yearly convention has forced them into. But the oddness of it all gets seriously worse when she discovers that her handsome young friend, along with just about everybody else resident in the tiny hotel, is dead.  Her investigation of the locally-cozy weirdness turns horrifically dark when Joy learns that her fellow hotel guests (and many other "unpassed-over" souls) are being stalked and kidnapped by minions of an amoral billionaire who sees them merely as an unexploited resource... one perfect for using to increase his already-obscene wealth.  Now Joy has to choose a side. Does she want to go home while knowing she's left human souls to be sucked into eternal bondage? Or will she take a stand, even though doing so may destroy her comfortable life forever?

...So this work of fiction is now up at Ebooks Direct as a standalone. (The Midnight Snack collection, in which it previously appeared, has been withdrawn until I can subtract D&B from it.)

...I still can't believe I wrote this line so long ago. At the time it just seemed like unusually cruel humor. But now, even if only in the current, ugly "meta" sense...? (shudder)

ERICKSON [the local evil billionaire] Why spend billions developing artificial intelligence when the real thing is free? It's been all around us for years, just waiting for someone smart enough to take it. I figured out how.

And since (in some other timeline) this could have been a film, here's its movie poster, for those of you who might have been wondering about what my Fantasy Casting thoughts were while I was working on this. ...I would have gladly lain me down in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and let any number of buses run over me to get this casting to happen.

A lot of libraries depend on IMLS grants! If they go away we will lose librarians and libraries may close, or at least significantly decrease their services. This will affect funding for technology classes, free resources for the blind, summer reading, databases, free internet access assistance, and interlibrary loans among other things. As the administration also targets social security, immigration, and other safety nets, libraries are attempting to fill the gap for the public, and things will get much harder without reliable funding.

This is also IN ADDITION to the administration calling book bans "fake" and some states attempting to pass laws to criminalize librarians, with fears in the library world that they will also try to make it a federal crime to promote or otherwise provide access to "inappropriate materials" which have included books that promote "gender ideology" or basically any character that isn't a white hetero cis man. That is one of the cornerstones of Project 2025. This IMLS takeover will only make things worse, and make it harder for people to access information.

Personally, we have been told by our director to be very careful and not talk about this while at work because of fears of retaliation, we have had several calls from the public to remove books with gay characters (we didn't), and as an adult services librarian, I am already seeing an impact on databases I help the public use. Medline Plus, the only free and easy-to-use medical encyclopedia for the public I have been able to find, is a US government website and already has warnings above certain pages about the "harms of gender ideology". This warning can be seen above pages on health disparities and abortion.

If you're so inclined and live in the US, the ALA put together a portal that makes it easy to email your reps with a script. You can find the portal here. I would also recommend investing in your local library, post on social media what services you use, sign up for a library card and see how many resources you can access for free. Many state library associations collect user stories of libraries so they can show their stakeholders they matter. Like my library, it is likely that staff have been warned not to discuss this at work because of fears of retaliation, so try not to talk to librarians about this at work.

General advocacy page:

Article from NPR about the takeover:

What happens if IMLS goes away:

A report on how much museums give back to the US economy:

An interactive map of what IMLS funds in the US:

Simply borrow the ebook from libby, download it as a .ascm (drm epub thing) on your computer, then run the .ascm file through a drm remover of your choice (third-party plugins in Calibre is what to do). you can then keep the drm-free .epub and return the libby loan. Boom.

Win/win/win.

You get to keep the ebook (ALSO libby usually has high-quality files. so it's better than piracy).

You're borrowing the book from the library. They get their numbers up, you're supporting the author and your library.

My friend Fadel (@fadel-dani) wrote to me today. He asked me to imagine going about my day, and being surrounded by death and danger everywhere.

He writes about the narrowing of life in the genocide:

They bombed a mosque, so we don't go to pray at the mosques. They bombed a café, so we don't sit in cafés. They bombed a bus, so we don't ride buses. They bombed a car, so we don't drive cars. They bombed a tent, They bombed a water station, They bombed a diesel seller, They bombed a charging point, They bombed and bombed and bombed…

He had been trying to raise funds to get emergency surgery after surviving a bombing that destroyed his home and left him injured with shrapnel in his body.

Before he can even travel to emergency care, he needs medication that costs $400 every month, and he and his family need food so they do not die from starvation in the genocidal famine imposed by Israel.

His campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters (#197) and 90-ghost.