vivweb01

  The world of online e-reading has become a confusing place over recent years, with a 'battle royal' raging between the publishing industry and internet users as more and more content goes online.  The industry are desperately trying to preserve their income streams in the face of increased online access to e-publications of all sorts which are outside their control, but the 'shadow' libraries are continually finding ways to outwit them..... It would seem obvious that a new publishing model is long overdue, with some alternative arrangement for internet access when a book is first published, and a better deal for struggling authors on whom we all depend for our fiction. Until the publishers accept this, and act accordingly, they will continue to lose ground; their business model will continue to struggle, and could eventually fail altogether. In an attempt to unravel some of the complexity of accessing reading material online while this battle continues, here is ...

  Microsoft (MS) withdrew support for Windows 7 way back in 2014 in line with their general policy of planned version obsolescence. By all accounts, there are still a considerable number of older pcs running Win 7; their owners have either simply not been able to afford the cost of an upgrade, or have heard of the obstacles to upgrading, and are quite reasonably reluctant to risk trying to upgrade an older pc with a new OS that it may not be able to cope with. For anyone actually brave enough to try upgrading a Win 7 pc,   MS have thrown an additional spanner in the works by no longer offering   downloads for Win 10 or Win 11 installation on pcs which they detect are still running Windows 7 or XP. Users are therefore effectively   prevented by MS from using either of the more recent OS versions......the very versions that MS were originally prepared to let you upgrade to for free. This is an obvious ploy to force users to replace their old (but still serviceable) ...