I was planning on covering each codex with a post of its own... with links to WorldCat records and some background info for each, when i came across Amazon's kindle editions of 10 codices in digital format.
And then i did a little more digging and found the books on smashwords too... And then found it's the same guy - jason merkoski, from oscura press... He claims he's a technology evangelist, for Amazon... whats a TE anyway?
So I bought it - because the price was right and you can open Kindle books on your PC now... and then I started thinking the images looked familiar....
So i did a little more digging - and it turns out this merkoski guy had downloaded all the images for these books from a free web source, FAMSI the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, packaged them into a kindle edition, and is now selling it for .99 cents a pop and up. I guess its the american way - but is it the the native american way?
Here's the link to the Codex Tonalamatl Aubin on FAMSI - oh and the resolution is better than the kindle edition, as well.
but what about fair use and value adding - you may say? well, heres an excerpt from the "value" he's added to the hard work FAMSI did in digitizing these masterpieces and making them available to researchers.
"Any of these symbols on any of the codex pages could earn you a great tattoo – and it’s somehow a surprise that lines so bold never graved a person’s skin. And I hope that hipsters of a more feral age will start inking themselves with these living patterns. Because they are alive. They beat with blood, life, something all too familiar, and something so strangerous that you’ll never understand it."
tattooed feral hipsters? strangerous indeed!
And then i did a little more digging and found the books on smashwords too... And then found it's the same guy - jason merkoski, from oscura press... He claims he's a technology evangelist, for Amazon... whats a TE anyway?
So I bought it - because the price was right and you can open Kindle books on your PC now... and then I started thinking the images looked familiar....
So i did a little more digging - and it turns out this merkoski guy had downloaded all the images for these books from a free web source, FAMSI the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, packaged them into a kindle edition, and is now selling it for .99 cents a pop and up. I guess its the american way - but is it the the native american way?
Here's the link to the Codex Tonalamatl Aubin on FAMSI - oh and the resolution is better than the kindle edition, as well.
but what about fair use and value adding - you may say? well, heres an excerpt from the "value" he's added to the hard work FAMSI did in digitizing these masterpieces and making them available to researchers.
"Any of these symbols on any of the codex pages could earn you a great tattoo – and it’s somehow a surprise that lines so bold never graved a person’s skin. And I hope that hipsters of a more feral age will start inking themselves with these living patterns. Because they are alive. They beat with blood, life, something all too familiar, and something so strangerous that you’ll never understand it."
tattooed feral hipsters? strangerous indeed!
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