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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 4:37:18 GMT
This is for the exchange of book-like public information. I’ll start:
I have available any book which was published before around 1920 in my world as long as you know the title and author. I might have other books available, but whether or not I can get them to you depends on local copyright law, which is fairly complicated.
Leaf, I would very much appreciate the title and author of a good, comprehensive history of your 21st century, preferably one that is out of copyright-or-equivalent in your world (I would expect the best such histories would have been published hundreds of years ago, so that probably doesn’t matter). There is no need to get me the actual text.
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Post by Dotted Lines on May 7, 2015 4:54:07 GMT
Are there books about different places on Earth near the year 2000?
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Post by Leaf on May 7, 2015 12:30:43 GMT
The most memorable comprehensive history of the 21st century (not solely; it gets into the 19th, 20th, and a little of the 22nd too) that I've read is definitely Before the Jump by Pip Valere. I'd be interested to hear if your world's magic is able to produce it.
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Post by Fortunomancer on May 7, 2015 13:44:18 GMT
I have access to the Nimora Palace Library, which is the best magic library in my world and has a stellar selection of books on other topics as well. The books won't be of any practical use, since no one else on the forum has access to Mysisian magic and Mysis has no duplicates on this forum thus far, but I will make them available for recreational purposes.
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Post by Dotted Lines on May 7, 2015 13:49:50 GMT
Sorry, I just read that again and saw you need a more specific book. So that limits it to books I know of and don't have access to. Do you have The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitts? Or the Biography of Sean Penn, which is not forbidden, but inaccessible, in case you'd rather not give away forbidden books.
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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 14:33:31 GMT
I do not have any of those (if the biography you’re referring to is posthumous, it hasn’t even been written yet), and if I did then I would also need the author of the biography (is it an autobiography). I don’t know if Leaf does.
I doubt that you will be able to get a copy of any forbidden books, unless the people forbidding them don’t have any actual legal power over your access to the Internet.
Leaf, I knew when I started this thread that I could get outworld books with just title, author, and a unique identification of the world. That is in fact what gave me the idea for this thread in the first place.
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Post by Leaf on May 7, 2015 14:39:02 GMT
I need a little more to go on than Andrew in order to locate a book. What's the Biography of Sean Penn? When and where were these books published?
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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 14:43:27 GMT
Sean Penn is a real, living person in my world, born in 1960. The biography was probably published less than two hundred years after that (and I would be surprised if people were still writing biographies about him that late).
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Post by Leaf on May 7, 2015 14:44:51 GMT
Can't find anything, but I don't have quick access to literally every book ever published in the last thousand years, just a decent chunk of them.
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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 15:30:10 GMT
Leaf, this book is… odd. It isn’t made of paper like I expected; is this plastic?
Also, maybe I missed it because I only did a quick skim, but could you say more about the Jump the title of this book mentions? The author seems to assume you already know about it, even though this is a history book written hundreds of years after the events it describes; it must be big or important if it’s still common knowledge.
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Post by Leaf on May 7, 2015 15:38:04 GMT
Oh, you got a print edition. I guess that makes sense. Yeah, only backwards slobs and curious schoolchildren write on compressed plant fibres these days.
"Pre-Jump" is a widely understood term for the historical era leading up to the invention of wormhole jump technology, a form of faster-than-light travel that lets us move between distant star systems in days or weeks instead of decades or centuries.
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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 15:45:31 GMT
You have wormhole jump technology? How do wormholes form? Can you make one to specific destinations?
I’m not a physics expert, but the concept of wormholes has entered popular culture to some extent. From what I understand about them, if they’re real and not the same thing as the concordances, then there might be one that goes to one of the concordant worlds.
Also, probably of much less importance, what other kind of edition could I have gotten? Do audiobooks become more popular in the next thousand years?
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Post by Leaf on May 7, 2015 15:56:46 GMT
Well, most book-disks do include an audio format, but I doubt that's quite what you're asking. Books, except in rare cases, come as data imprinted on small plastic disks which can be machine-read and displayed by a variety of electronic devices such as comconsoles and handheld readers. You can also get just the data without the physical media, but it's nice to have something to fill up a shelf with, even if you're going to load them all onto your reader anyway.
Wormholes form naturally. If there's a way to artificially produce one, nobody's found it yet. I can recommend some textbooks if you're really interested, but 5-space math is an enormous pain, be warned.
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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 16:18:15 GMT
Then I am not really interested. I could probably find somebody who is, but that’s more likely to happen if wormholes do in fact go to the concordant worlds. Is there any simple way to check that without either knowing how to pilot a spaceship or knowing wormhole math? I suppose you might want to answer in the Astrophysics thread if it seems likely this will become a longer discussion. Maybe you should summarize wormholes there too, if it seems like they might be relevant; I don’t even know the non-textbook-requiring basics, and I expect many readers haven’t heard of wormholes in the first place.
Most people read books electronically? I guess that does make sense given technological advances, but I wouldn’t want to do that currently.
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Post by Leaf on May 7, 2015 16:51:18 GMT
In order to locate a wormhole you need some expensive and specialized technology. In order to fly through one you need some even more expensive and specialized technology, and a pilot with the right neurological quirks who has had the right brain surgery.
I don't think of wormholes as being under quite the same heading as astrophysics, but maybe you're right and they belong in the same thread.
I have seen some print books, and while they're often prettier than what you get out of a reader, they're not nearly as convenient.
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