A Blog Book, by Victor Grauer



. . . . . for Alan Lomax, who lives . . . . .



I felt that their music came from the back of time, but also, to a certain extent, from my own depths.

Simha Arom

Monday, August 15, 2011

Sounding the Depths, online and in paperback

Sounding the Depths is now complete in eighteen chapters, readable either online, as a freely accessible "blog book" -- or as a beautifully bound paperback, available for purchase via CreateSpace or Amazon.com. To read online from the beginning, you may start with the Preface or Introduction -- or go directly to any of the chapters or "sidebars" from the Blog Archive to your right.

After receiving some complaints from people who, like myself, prefer reading from a printed text, I decided it would be a good idea to make a hard copy version available. My task was made especially simple and convenient by a remarkable organization called CreateSpace, which enables authors to publish their own work at minimal cost, thanks to the new "print-on-demand" technology that is transforming the world of publishing. 

The paperback contains the complete text, more or less as it appears on this blog, though with a number of relatively minor revisions. However, it doesn't contain, for obvious reasons, any of the audio or video links. Nor does it contain, for reasons not so obvious, most of the figures (photos, maps, diagrams, etc.). As I see it, such materials are covered by the "fair use" provisions of US copyright law, but publishers and their lawyers are running scared these days, so in order to include them in the printed version I'd have needed to obtain permissions for each and every one, an all but impossible task for reasons that should be obvious. 

Thus, for the convenience of hard copy readers, I've added two pages to this blog, one containing the Audio-Visual Examples, another containing the Figures. (Both links can be found directly under the Blog Archive.) 

The paperback, priced at $18.00, can be ordered from either CreateSpace or Amazon. (If you order from CreateSpace I'll get a larger commission, but you'll get free shipping from Amazon with an order of $25 or more.)