Give me the moonlight, give me the monster....

I'm a great fan of H. P. Lovecraft. Libraries don't stock his books these days, either because they are out of fashion or because they give the librarians the willies. Fortunately I now have an ebook reader, so I can read creepy horror stories anywhere, anytime, in any language. As long as I can find the ebooks, that is. Thank the Old Ones for the internet!

As Lovecraft died in the thirties his works are in the public domain, so I can download his ebooks freely and legally onto my ebook reader. The original English versions at least. In other languages it is more tricky. The French translator was longer-lived than the luckless Lovecraft himself, so the French versions are still in copyright. Unless you find a public-domain fan translation.

As to the German translations, who knows when the translator died? And what of? German public-domain ebooks seem to be hard to find in general, I suspect the spelling reforms are to blame. Any book more than about thirty years old is difficult to read because a lot of words are now spelled wrong. It's easier to read something modern.

And then there is the problem of finding audio books. These are copyrighted and so shouldn't be in the public domain. Unless they are read by volunteers in a public-domain project, like Librivox (www.librivox.org). You can find any number of free audio books in French and English, if you know where to look.

You can also find any number of Russian ebooks and audio books on the internet. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to buy them. Direct download websites are usually region restricted. If you don't have a Russian IP then you can't buy a file download from a Russian website. You have to stick to free downloads, which are not restricted, although I doubt if most of them are legal.

The Russians just don't seem to differentiate between legal and illegal uses of the internet. When I search for free reading I keep ending up on torrent sites, which show me adverts for services I don't want and would rather my kids don't see. The last time I looked for Anna Karenina in PDF I nearly ordered a 23-year old medical student from Moscow State University by mistake. She turned out to be surprisingly cheap. I wonder if I could hire her to read me Russian literature?