(1) JAMES A. MOORE (1965-2024). [Item by Anne Marble.]Horror and fantasy author James A. Moore died March 27. Christopher Golden made the announcement in a concise obituary on Facebook.
Celebrated horror and fantasy author James A. Moore passed away this morning at the age of 58. Moore was the author of more than fifty horror and fantasy novels, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and the grimdark fantasy series Seven Forges and Tides of War. Moore also co-wrote many novels and stories with his longtime collaborator Charles R. Rutledge.
His early career highlights included major contributions to White Wolf Games’ World of Darkness, and he was especially proud of his first comic book script sale, to Marvel Comics original series set in the world of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. A prolific and versatile writer, Jim wrote novels based on various media properties, including Alien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Avengers.
He was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award three times, for his novel Serenity Falls, in the long fiction category for Bloodstained Oz, a collaboration with Christopher Golden, and as editor (with Golden) for the groundbreaking horror anthology The Twisted Book of Shadows, for which the pair won the Shirley Jackson Award.
Beyond his work, Jim Moore was a much-beloved figure in the horror community, a tireless champion of other writers and their work, who mentored dozens of new writers, relentlessly urging them to pursue their desire to tell stories. He is survived by his wife, Tessa Moore, and his legions of readers. No wake or funeral is planned, but a celebration of life will be held sometime in April.
And on his own blog Golden has written a longer and more personal remembrance: “James A. Moore”.
Many writers are remembering Moore as a supportive friend and a mentor.
A couple of GoFundMe campaigns were established by Camp Necon to help James A. Moore (and his family). There was one established to help him during a cancer battle, and there was a more recent one established to help both him and his wife with medical expenses after he beat cancer: “Fundraiser for James A. Moore by Camp Necon : Please Help Jim & Tessa Moore (COVID-19 Expenses)”.
Now a GoFundMe has been started for his memorial expenses.
“Fundraiser by Christopher Golden : James A. Moore Final Wishes and Memorial Expenses”.
This is hard to do. Jim would’ve hated it. He received so much help from so many of you over the past five years, through cancer and Covid and surgeries and job loss and housing loss and amputation. We did two major GoFundMe campaigns during that time. Over the past year, there were moments we talked about doing a third one, but Jim hated the idea of asking again, no matter how much trouble he was in. Sympathy fatigue is real, and so many other people needed help, too.
Jim is going to be cremated. The expense for that is nothing compared to a funeral and a casket and a burial plot, but it’s still costly. I also want to be able to gather everyone together to have a Celebration of Life in a way that honors him. If we could wait a few months, we could risk doing it outside, but I know that everyone is feeling raw and would like to do it sooner. I’d like to do it on a Saturday or Sunday in April.
I’ve set the goal of this GFM to $6K to pay for both his cremation (and associated expenses) and the memorial gathering. I’m not sure it will be enough, but we’ll see. PLEASE NOTE that any monies received over and above the costs of those two things will be given directly to Jim’s wife, Tessa, to help her as she sorts out her next steps. These years have been hard enough, and we’d like to do all we can to help at this time.
(2) WORLDBUILDING ON EARTH. “Arkady Martine in Singapore: On Sci-Fi City Planning and What Makes a ‘City of the Future’” at Reactor.
…Usually in a sci-fi setting, the city functions as a snapshot in time that helps to illustrate how characters engage with their environment; for Martine, this might involve how long it takes for a character to get to their job, or if they even have a job to get to at all. It is not so much concerned with planning, or what drives planning decisions. “Fiction in general, and science fiction specifically, is bad at thinking about city planning as a discipline,” she explains. “Mostly because it feels absolutely dull, it’s worse than economics. I say this as someone who’s trained as a city planner and who loves it very much and actually finds it deeply fascinating and exciting and horrifically political.” More often than not, she finds that the idea of a constructed, planned city in science fiction—with some exceptions—is simply a given.
“In the US they go on and on…that planning is some kind of neutral process, and that the point of a planner is to be a facilitator,” says Martine. “This is why I ended up in politics and policy and not in planning, because to be perfectly honest, it’s bullshit.” She cites the origins of Victorian infrastructure as a starting point for the western view that the constructed environment determines behavior, “which is that there are too many people and too little space and it’s not sanitary, which is all true.” The solution is not actually ‘everyone has to live in a perfect little garden house,’ but that’s the ideal that is constructed.”…
(3) PURPLE FRIENDS AND OTHERS. “’IF’ Trailer — Ryan Reynolds’ Imaginary Friend Comes to Life” – Collider introduces the movie, which arrives in theaters on May 17.
IF focuses on a young girl with the unique ability to see not only her own imaginary friends but also those of others, particularly the ones left behind by their human companions. These forgotten imaginary beings, once vital to the lives of many children, find themselves lonely and at risk of being forsaken indefinitely. In their desperation, they ally themselves with the girl, seeing her as their last chance to be recalled and cherished again before it’s too late.
(4) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 106 of Octothorpe promises a “Fitter Happier Healthier Eastercon”. Which, of course, you want, right?
Octothorpe 106 is now available! You can listen to it while at Eastercon, while travelling to Eastercon, or in defiance of the occurrence of Eastercon. We discuss, er, Eastercon. We talk about transcripts a little, too, before discussing awards, science fiction, cricket, and games. It’s basically a pretty representative episode, is what we’re saying.
(5) PASSING THE PLATE. 13th Dimension ranks “13 Delectable ALEX ROSS Collector Plates”. A whole gallery of images here, naturally.
3. Christmas with the Justice League of America (Warner Bros. Studio Store, 2000). Harking back to some of the classic covers of DC’s Christmas With the Super-Heroes specials, Ross creates a jubilant yuletide scene, literally framed with a bit of melancholy. The classic satellite era League (along with Ross favorites Captain Marvel and Plastic Man) celebrate in their own unique ways: The toast between Martian Manhunter and Red Tornado; Black Canary hanging on Green Arrow’s shoulder; Hawkman and Hawkgirl observing the strange Earth custom of decorating the tree; and my favorite, Green Lantern making the tree lights with his power ring. But all of this is superseded by the Man of Steel beckoning the Dark Knight to let his often-lonely crusade rest for the night, and come inside and join the celebration.
(6) LIADEN UNIVERSE® NEWS. Sharon Lee announced that the eARC (electronic Advance Reading Copy) of Ribbon Dance is now available from Baen Books.
Also, a spoiler discussion page has been set up for those folks who have read the eARC and Want To Talk About It. Here is that link.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 28, 1912 — A. Bertram Chandler. (Died 1984.) Tonight’s Scroll features a Birthday for a writer from Australia — A. Bertram Chandler.
Did you ever hear of space opera? Of course you have. Well, the universe of Chandler’s character John Grimes was such. A very good place to start is the Baen Books omnibus of To The Galactic Rim which contains three novels and seven stories. If there’s a counterpart to him, it’d be I think Dominic Flandry who appeared in Anderson’s Technic History series. (My opinion, yours may differ.) Oh, and I’ve revisited both to see if the Suck Fairy had dropped by. She hadn’t.
Connected to the Grimes stories are the Rim World works of which The Deep Reaches of Space is the prime work. The main story is set in an earlier period of the same future timeline as Grimes, a period in which ships are the magnetic Gaussjammers, recalled with some nostalgia in Grimes’ time.
But that’s hardly all that he wrote. I remember fondly The Alternate Martians, a novella that he did. A space expedition to Mars that find themselves in the worlds of H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. Why he chose the latter I know not as I’d never heard of him. It’s a great story well told. And fun to boot. It was first published as an Ace Double, The Alternate Martians / Empress of Outer Space. Gateway has released it as a separate epub for a mere buck ninety nine at the usual suspects.
He wrote a reasonably large number of stand-alone-alones, so what did I like? For a bit of nicely done horror, you can’t beat The Star Beasts — yes, I know that there’s nothing terribly original there but it’s entertaining to read; Glory Planet has a watery Venus occupied by anti-machine theocracy opposed by a high-tech city-state fascinating; and finally I liked The Coils of Timeenin which a scientist has created a Time Machine but now needs a guinea pig, errr, a volunteer to go back through time and see what’s there — did it go as planned? Oh guess.
I see that he’s written but a handful of short stories, none of which I’ve read other than the ones in To The Galactic Rim. So who here has?
He’s won five Ditmars and The Giant Killer novel was nominated for a Retro Hugo.
All in all, I like him a lot.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Bliss has another take on the shaggy dog story.
- Reality Check hears from Yoda.
(9) SOUNDS FAMILIAR. From the New York Times: “Like My Book Title? Thanks, I Borrowed It.” Just like the Scroll item headlines here, yes?
You see it everywhere, even if you don’t always recognize it: the literary allusion. Quick! Which two big novels of the past two years borrowed their titles from “Macbeth”? Nailing the answer — “Birnam Wood” and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” — might make you feel a little smug.
Perhaps the frisson of cleverness (I know where that’s from!), or the flip-side cringe of ignorance (I should know where that’s from!), is enough to spur you to buy a book, the way a search-optimized headline compels you to click a link. After all, titles are especially fertile ground for allusion-mongering. The name of a book becomes more memorable when it echoes something you might have heard — or think you should have heard — before.
This kind of appropriation seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon. Before the turn of the 20th century titles were more descriptive than allusive. The books themselves may have been stuffed with learning, but the words on the covers were largely content to give the prospective reader the who (“Pamela,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Frankenstein”), where (“Wuthering Heights,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Treasure Island”) or what (“The Scarlet Letter,” “War and Peace,” “The Way We Live Now”) of the book.
Somehow, by the middle of the 20th century, literature had become an echo chamber. Look homeward, angel! Ask not for whom the sound and the fury slouches toward Bethlehem in dubious battle. When Marcel Proust was first translated into English, he was made to quote Shakespeare, and “In Search of Lost Time” (the literal, plainly descriptive French title) became “Remembrance of Things Past,” a line from Sonnet 30.
(10) YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING. “Liu Cixin: ‘I’m often asked – there’s science fiction in China?’” he told the Guardian.
…Science fiction was a rarity in China when Liu was growing up because most western books were banned. Living in a coal mining town in Shanxi province as a young man, he found a book hidden in a box that once belonged to his father. It was Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, and Liu read it in secret, and in doing so forged a lifelong love of science fiction….
(11) BREAD FOR CIRCUSES. “The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’” in the Guardian. Anybody who’s bought an ebook from Amazon doesn’t need a natural disaster to convince them about the advantages of owning physical media.
When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator.
Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children.
“I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”…
(12) IN SPACE NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU LAUGH. “Spaceballs: 12 Behind the Scenes Stories of Mel Brooks’ Ludicrous Sci-Fi Adventure” at Moviemaker. Here’s one I never thought of:
Spaceballs Was Also Inspired by It Happened One Night
One of the biggest reference points for Spaceballs wasn’t a sci-fi film, but a Frank Capra classic, 1934’s It Happened One Night. The film was the first to sweep the top five Oscar categories — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress.
The film follows an heiress (Claudette Colbert) who flees her dull groom on her wedding day and falls for a cool regular guy played by Clark Gable. “We took that same basic plot and shot it into space!” Brooks wrote in his memoir.
In Spaceballs, Princess Vespa of Planet Druidia (Daphne Zuniga) flees her dull groom, Prince Valium, on her wedding day, and falls for a cool regular guy named Lone Starr (Bill Pullman).
(13) DON’T ASK? “Artemis astronauts will carry plants to the moon in 2026” reports Space.com. Strangely, neither this article nor the NASA press release it’s based on say what specific plants will be part of the experiment.
The first astronauts to land on the moon in more than half a century will set up a lunar mini-greenhouse, if all goes according to plan.
NASA has selected the first three science experiments to be deployed by astronauts on the moon’s surface on the Artemis 3 mission in 2026. Among them is LEAF (“Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora”), which will study how space crops fare in the exotic lunar environment.”LEAF will be the first experiment to observe plant photosynthesis, growth and systemic stress responses in space-radiation and partial gravity,” NASA officials wrote in a statement Tuesday (March 26) announcing the selection of the three experiments….
(14) WAS HE LOST IN SPACE? Dan Monroe investigates “Whatever Happened to ROBBY The ROBOT?”
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Slashfilm covers (and uncovers) “The Most Controversial Costumes In Sci-Fi History”.
The worst superhero costume in history, space bikinis, and a leather trenchcoat that sparked a media frenzy — sci-fi costumes don’t get much more controversial than this.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Anne Marble, Kathy Sullivan, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
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First! Really it is!
Now I’m off to listeni to Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way while munching on some Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups.
(1) Too many cool and beloved writers are dying. 🙁
(6) Great! When I catch up with the series, I’ll get that one, too.
(7) Another author in my teetering TBR mountain. And what an author photo!
(11) This might go for music CDs, too. They can be worth something outside of a hurricane if you have hard-to-find or underground CDs. I have some heavy metal CDs that are especially obscure.
11) this argument might make sense for a print book. But for a DVD, you need a DVD player and electricity, it’s not a low tech option
(2) City planning. You’re thinking Robert Moses, or worse. Go read Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, and then think about your city.
Birthday: Chandler, yes. A, er, Grimes-er distant future. And CatE – Kline was a competitor to Burroughs (not as good).
(9) Oh, dear. And here I am, naming my novels what they’re about…
(11) Hell, yes. And I’m still trying to figure out how to pry Amazon’s hands off the books I bought, so I can BACK THEM UP. And maybe let my partner read them. I BOUGHT THEM, and Amazon MAY NOT REDEFINE “BOUGHT” as “RENTED”, until they get tired of carrying them.
(14) Can I has a full-sized Robbie, please?
(15) I just adore brass bikini “armor” on women. But then, arseholes who make movies of wars, but the hero doesn’t wear a helmet… (they never show the hero getting their brains blown out).
bookworm1368: people buy generators. I will, one of these days. And… we really need a padded CD case, as we had for cassettes, to play in the car.
(14) if some watches this please tell me if he acknowledges that there wasn’t just one Robbie but multiple bits of him that were used over the years depending on what was needed for filming.
Mark, and others looking at 9
Epubor Ultimate
(11) I alas, need coherent, organized information on how to deDRM my Kindle and Kobo books, and then I’ll probably still need help. You absolutely have permission to wake me if you can do that.
Wednesday evening, I went to Deb Geisler’s wake. It was lovely. Closed casket. Her doctoral robe and her sword made from meteoric iron were laid on top.
Her family came in from Ohio, and both a number of her students, many members of NESFA, and at least half the Noreascon 4 committee were there. Truly the best sort of fannish wake.
LisC: She actually had a sword of METEORIC IRON? That must have cost an arm, leg, and a firstborn.
@mark–Yes. They both had good incomes, and they had good investments. And Michael absolutely considered her to be worth the arm, the leg, and the firstborn.
(4) Anybody know what they said about transcripts?
As a new episode comes out they immediately post an AI transcript, then will go back a little later to edit into better shape.
And there are AI transcripts online for all other past episodes. They’re rough. However, I can’t hear the audio so they’re a terrific help for me. I find I can piece together what is being said with the help of informed guesswork….
1) 58 is too young. Condolences to his wife, his friends, and his fans.
3) My invisible companion still resides in my psyche, guiding me toward the right path, and chiming in with his two cents when I get writer’s block.
9) (I feel a pricking in my thumbs), “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Bradbury, borrowed from Shakespeare.
13) I hope they have better luck than I did with my geraniums!
7) Chandler is one of my favorite authors. Half way through the first book of his that I read, The Big Black Mark, I was hooked. He writes the kind of Space Opera that I’m always looking for.
And yes Cat, I have read his short fiction. Great stuff but be prepared for really bad puns.
Thanks for the title credit!
(11) There’s a good SF story in there about post-apocalyptic DVD rentals
@Pierre E. Pettinger, JR.
Absolutely no to buying Epubor. DeDRM 10.0.9 and KFX Input plugins in calibre do everything that does.
Thanks for remembering Arthur Bertram “Jack” Chandler.
I’m actually doing a series on the author for Aurealis magazine which will be beginning shortly.
I’ve long been a fan and quite a number of years ago I began working on a Concordance of his “rim worlds” stories. All John Grimes as character stories take place within the Rim Worlds “universe”; a good many non-Grimes centered ones do as well. (There are multiple alternate “Grimes”s, including one named “Andy”, not “John”.)
Anderson’s Flandry actually appeared, with permission, in Chandler’s The Dark Dimensions novel. As did another Grimes and that Empress Irene that was also mentioned. Much of Chandler’s work involved alternate time lines. (The author himself, under his own name and at least one of his pseudonyms, also appears in some stories, like The Deep Reaches of Space previously mentioned and The Pied Potter).
Deep Reaches is actually not a “central” Rim Worlds story, actually taking place in a timeline adjacent to the main ones (there are two primary rim worlds timelines, 32 total charted so far). “Gaussjammer” ships were used during humanity’s 2nd expansion into the galaxy (the first by sleeper ship), but were replaced by “improved Ehrenhaft drives” (that drive often failed owing to deep space electrical storms, resulting in at least 13 “lost colonies”, several of which are featured in various works) and ultimately obsoleted by the new “Mannschenn Drive”, which “moves a ship ahead in space and backwards in time”, neatly handling the effects of time dilation.
The Alternate Martians is preceded by The Coils of Time in another side-stream series; there’s Empress Irene (Empress of Outer Space, Space Mercenaries, Nebula Alert, the Dark Dimensions); Christopher Wilkinson (Coils, Alternate Martians: fyi, he probably featured both ERB and OAK owing to their “rivalry”.) Two shorts featuring the crew of the ship Epsilon Draconis (nicknamed the Eupeptic Dragon); the “Derek Calver” stories (The Rim of Space and The Ship From Outside – Calver is a contemporary of Grimes’) and a whole series of one-offs featuring various characters and places in the Rim Worlds, ranging from its pre-galactic days (Half Pair, Castaway), through early expansion (Raiders of the Solar Frontier, The Habit); multiple stories related to the development of the first FTL drive (No Return, Homing Tantalus) and a bunch from the Gaussjammer era, including one of his most famous stories – The Cage.
He actually wrote some 200 short pieces, a handful of poems, multiple non-fiction pieces for various fanzines (including an “autobiography” for Grimes) and close to 40 novels.
Unfortunately, most of his short pieces remain as having only been published in the SF digests of the time and are often difficult or expensive to obtain. On the other hand, Baen has a series of ebooks and much of Grimes’ career is reasonable available on ABE.com.
The primary website for Chandler is http://www.bertramchandler.com, and much of my Rim Worlds website can be found on the internet archive – https://web.archive.org/web/20120709213245/http://www.rimworlds.com/rimworldsintro.htm
If anyone would like a “definitive” story order for the rim worlds tales (none of them on the web are correct, and every single omnibus series published so far does not even contain all of the Grimes stories), or a copy of my rim worlds alternate timelines grid (a rather large PDF that has far too much information stuffed into it), just ask.
(3) The central conceit has similarities to Drop Dead Fred (1991), starring Phoebe Cates (one of her final film roles before retiring in 1994) and the late, much-missed Rik Mayall.
(7) Chandler’s daughter Jenny is, of course, married to the celebrated British horror writer Ramsey Campbell,
(11) Mark wrote: “Amazon MAY NOT REDEFINE “BOUGHT” as “RENTED”, until they get tired of carrying them.”
Unfortunately, those who control the electrons and their storage hold the upper hand in this argument. The only way to truly possess a book, movie, tv show or musical composition is to own a physical copy (and, in the latter three cases, the technology to play it).
12) huh. This is the second time today I came across an article about the influence of It Happened One Night on pop culture. There’s a piece on the Collider website about how Bugs Bunny was based on Clark Gable’s performance in that movie. They’re over-stating it of course. More like a small reference was used. But still, never thought of that movie as having such long reverberations.
Speaking of “IF,” RIP Lou Gossett, Jr. 🙁
Laura,
Calibre used to be my go-to. I have the new DeDrm and KFX and, for me, Calibre no longer works. It will store kindle entries, but it will not convert, so I find Epubor invaluable. Everyone’s mileage will vary. But the cost is small. I am a fanatic about converting due to Amazon’s habit of removing content.
Now, I haven’t yet found a good way to convert video purchases from Amazon.
@mark, we had a shared Kindle account which at least would let your partner read your books. We buy from Kobo, and Calibre copes with that quite well although you need to set up an account with Adobe.
@Pierre E. Pettinger, JR.
I suppose if you have trouble getting calibre and plugins to work for some reason. But the underlying code is more than likely the same.
1) Just…damn. Gone way too soon.
If you want to do something nice for his widow (and yourself), then buy his Seven Forges series. Great stuff.
Regards,
Dann
If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. – Desmond Tutu
Another endorsement for Epubor Ultimate. I used to use DeDRM, but found it very dependent on which version of Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle I had installed. And further, it sometimes failed, especially with Kindle books. Epubor no doubt uses the same techniques as DeDRM to do its job, but I leave it to them to worry about the details. I have not yet had it fail (which is not to say that future measures from publishers might make it fail) on any book.
So: could I use DeDRM? Yes, mostly. But Epubor is a lot less work.
And I need not add that I am a strong supporter of copyright, and regard uses of this technology to violate copyright with disgust.
If DeDRM stops working for Kindle books, I’ll stop buying ebooks at Amazon.
@Vincent Manis
“. . . and regard uses of this technology to violate copyright with disgust.”
You realize, don’t you, that what you are doing is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? (and I freely admit that I do the same thing with ebooks myself).
These days, a file on my hard drive that I can read is a “physical copy”.
And… The Disney Mickey Copywrite Act should be burned. If I bought, it… and let’s note Tor and Baen explicitly state they provide books with no DRM, Amazon is violating that, providing corrupted books.
@mark–Amazon doesn’t violate the terms the publishers give to them.They just don’t tell you those titles don’t have DRM. If it’s a Tor or Baen book, you can just assume that. If it’s not those publishers, scroll down to the publishing details, and look for the phrase, “Simultaneous device usage: unlimited.” Those are also DRM-free.
@Lis Carey
No, Amazon books delivered in the KFX format all have DRM. Even though Tor’s book descriptions say:
And most Amazon books are in KFX format these days depending on how you download them. Even from Tor, Baen, Saga, and anything else that is suppose to be DRM-free. It is less restrictive on those books, but it is still there. You cannot download them with the current Kindle for PC/Mac and get a file that you can convert to epub to read on another ereader unless you remove the DRM. There are workarounds to get the files in the older format which is truly DRM-free for those books, but Amazon doesn’t tell you that.
Another advantage of Kobo is that DRM free books are delivered DRM free.
@Paul King
Yup, I buy most of my ebooks there. And if they do have DRM, there are two ways to free them.
Mark, it’s the Copyright Act, not the Copywrite Act which would give it a decidedly different intent. The latter delighting a wholly different group of individuals than the former and ensuring that almost no literature we now know existed. (Lecturing mode engaged there.)
@Laura–Last night, I spent an hour or so downloading books from my digital content library on Amazon, importing them to Calibre, converting them to epub, and sideloading them to my Kobo.
Where they open properly.
This only works with the books that are supposed to be DRM-free, rather strongly suggesting that those books, as downloaded from Amazon, are DRM-free.
@Lis Carey
Yup, you’re using one of the workarounds I mentioned to get non-KFX files. You have to have an Amazon device registered to your account to take advantage of that option.