New and free on Archive.org…

Hugh B. Cave, Magazines I Remember: Some Pulps, Their Editors, And What it Was Like to Write For Them, 1994. A 185 page book, with story-header illustrations from the pulps. Amazon and used book sellers will happily ding! your wallet for between £15 – £172 for this, in paper.

Hugh Barnett Cave (1910-2004) was a prolific pulp writer and a lifelong correspondent of Carl Jacobi. The book looks like an excellent mine of information, and the first five chapters appear to be extracts from the on-the-spot letters from one immersed in the pulp market — rather than a hazy attempt to recall matters from a distance of more than 50 years.

Definitely a book to cue up for proper reading on my Amazon Fire tablet! Sadly, I see that the PDF version has mangled the pictures, though.

Actually, this problem has usefully made me aware that Archive.org is now also offering a “COMIC BOOK ZIP” format for some types of content, which I had never noticed or tried before. This turns out to actually be the .CBZ format which can be read in any comic-book reading software. Superb quality, if 95Mb. So please forget my advice from a few days ago, about doing a manual conversion of the Archive.org .JP2s to .CBZ format. Archive.org now does it for you, if only on some types of content.

This means that you can drag-and-drop a link on a private Trello board for the relevant Archive.org page, to send a live clickable Web link from desktop to tablet. Then you can download the .CBZ directly from the tablet, rather than wrestle with a wi-fi or cable file-transfer. A simple Trello board saves having to use a mega-corp cloud service that wants to slurp up your entire bookmarks and every site URL you visit, just to send the occasional clickable URL from your desktop Web browser over to your Kindle or iPad tablet. Also works fine with YouTube videos. It’s a home-brew solution to the surprisingly difficult problem of sending a live clickable Web link from desktop to tablet, but it’s quick and it works.

On the Kindle, ComittoNxN (Comic Viewer) (paid) and Comic Time Reader (wholly free, ad-free, but needs to be sideloaded on a Kindle) are the best reader apps for free comics, in my experience, untethered from the locked-down offerings at Comixology and Marvel and similar services.