Musical Instruments by Tamarapu Sampath Kumaran

A nice discussion of the history and classification of musical instruments

Musical Instruments

Advantages and Disadvantages of eBooks

eBooks are becoming much more user friendly. Although they can be harder to read than a traditional book, they offer many advantages in terms of portability, storage space, convenience and cost. eBooks save publishers printing costs and can make it easier for authors to distribute their work. It is often more convenient to download an ebook as a digital file than to purchase a book at a store or have one shipped to you.

Many people still prefer the reading experience of traditional books and may enjoy collecting them as a hobby. Traditional books have the potential of lasting much longer than ebooks due to the tendency of digital files to become corrupted over time. Traditional books also avoid problems of competing file formats and ebook reader technology becoming obsolete over time.

Despite their disadvantages, ebooks are benefiting from improved screen resolutions and other technological improvements. They are quickly becoming an important source of reading material for many people.

What do you think about the relative merits of ebooks verses traditional books? Feel free to leave a comment.

Visit the Jane Austen Free eBook Collection

The Jane Austen Free eBook Collection now has six Jane Austen novels available for viewing or download. These special edition ebooks have linked tables of contents for convenient internal navigation. Much more is on the way, including some of Jane Austen's short stories. I also plan on updating the site with additional information about Jane Austen and her novels in the future.

Here are the titles that are currently available:

Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
Mansfield Park
Emma
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion

See also my Jane Austen astore for a wide variety of Jane Austen books, videos and audio books.

The Poker Face of Wall Street

Here is a book I read recently. I was rather surprised to find it on Scribd. The title suggests that this book would be of particular interest to investors and or gamblers. However, there is much here that would also interest students of history and human behavior. My favorite chapter "Pokernomics" (chapter 5) is a fascinating account of how poker and other games of chance have influenced history. It was a surprise to learn how poker was instrumental in the colonisation of the United States. I highly recommend this chapter, even for those who may have little incentive to read the rest of the book.


This book also features an interesting forward by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

(Unfortunately, this document is no longer available on Scribd. See below to find it on Amazon.)

Helpful Hints for Viewing Scribd Documents

Feel free to just read the Scribd document or book on my site. You're my guest and I don't charge rent. At the extreme upper right hand corner of the document you will see a little tab that will allow you to toggle to the full screen mode for easier reading. If you would prefer to download a pdf or plain text version of the ebook for reading elsewhere, simply click on the Scribd link at the upper left corner of the document. This will take you to to the document's page at Scribd.com. In the upper left hand corner, you should see a download link. (These options are not available for all documents.)

That's just the beginning. If you click on the more tab at the top of the document (while you're at this site), you will find numerous other options including sharing and embedding features. For Blogger blogs, you can easily embed a Scribd document by simply copying and pasting the embed code into your post editor.

See also:
Scribd FAQs
Downloading from Scribd
Embedding a document from Scribd