What are the best e-book editions of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" that I can buy?

[The Laws of Biology]

What makes any e-book edition superior? In my view, these features make an e-book edition superior:

Easy to add highlight marking to the text.

Possible to electronically copy all or much of the text, for private use only.

I see that both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" are available in Kindle e-book format, for sale on Amazon. But I haven't liked Kindle in the past. It seems to forbid or severely limiting electronical copying and pasting. 

Also, what is the best online store to buy the best e-book edition of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" and other books by Ayn Rand?

[The Laws of Biology]

On the one hand, I do understand that publishers sometimes restrict the ability of the e-book buyer to electronically copy and paste from e-books, since they are worried that scofflaw types will post the whole book on the Internet. That's a real concern. That would be illegal, and it should never be done. Copyright owners have a right to prevent their texts being indiscriminately disseminated. 

But, on the other hand, when I pay for an e-book, I would very much like to be able to copy and paste portions of the book for purposes of personal study and note making. 

[tadmjones]

But paying for the e-book doesn't mean anything other than accepting the terms of the trade. Maybe there should be a payment structure to allow for 'extra' copying authorizations vs more /all restrictions.

[Boydstun]

LB,

For highlighting of my hardcopy books, I just use strips of sticky notes, pressed onto the beginning of a passage I need to absorb or return to. Libraries don't allow that. But for my personal library, its fine by me. Years later, it allows me to open a book first to my sequence of stickies to get back on track about what's in the book for me. And sometimes, sadly, the existence of stickies in a book tell me I've read the book before, whereas I thought I had not.

For cut-and-past from my books, we have a scanner, which puts the section into a digital photo, which can be kept for personal use or even posted at some places such as Facebook or here. Usually, I just type out the passage for posting. 

An e-book (only 33 pages) of my poetry is to be issued soon, along with an audio book. It is alright with me if you cut-and-paste poems out of there if the publishers allow it, provided you mention in any posting of a poem that I created it and warn that it may be hazardous to your brain.

A scan from East of Eden: 

Edited June 12, 2024 by Boydstun

[Reidy]

This must be the passage that Mimi Reisel Gladstein says is a knockoff of The Fountainhead.

[Boydstun]

Yes, I imagine this is the passage she was referring to. This passage is integral to the sweeping arc of East of Eden* (whose theme is the power and glory of human free will), which appeared in 1952, nine years after The Fountainhead.

In the early 1970's, one weekend, my life-partner and I were at home doing some pretty usual individual activities. I was studying my physics, and he was reading fiction. He then did something he would never do. He walked over to where I was and handed me this book (this very copy), open to this page, and said "read these two pages." We always referred to it as "the glory passage."*

Notice what is missing from Rand in this passage in Steinbeck: egoism, beneficiary egoism. Rand in Anthem, Fountainhead, and Atlas tied egoism (including the beneficiary strand, not only the agency strand) to the already long-running American valuation of individualism (against the herd, as Emerson said) and creative innovation. It is yet unsettled how extensive and durable Rand's graft of the one tree onto the other will be in American culture. 

[The Laws of Biology]

1. I saw the 1955 "East of Eden" film starring James Dean and directed by Elia Kazan (who also directed "On the Waterfront" as his defense for his ratting out Communists in Hollywood to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities). 
2. I don't recall that "East of Eden" film having any theme of heroic individualism in the vein of Ayn Rand.
3. I thought that "East of Eden" film was expressing a tragic sense of life, with people torn apart (torn from each other and divided within themselves) by their passions, greed, sexual lusts, violence, egotism, lies, secrets, and the desire to keep up appearances so as to stay in good graces with old fashioned Christian religious folk who tended to lead the local community.
4. The newly discovered mother of the two young men perhaps is depicted as an individualist, somewhat in the mode of an Ayn Rand character. But I didn't think the film presented her as especially or necessarily heroic or moral. I seem to recall that she owned and ran a house of prostitution.
5. And so, I was surprised to see that text above, from the Steinbeck novel, that does seem like it could almost have been written by Ayn Rand.
6. I always assumed that Steinbeck's novels promoted some sort of Socialism, or at least New Deal Liberalism, and not any sort of individualism.
7. This all throws a bit of monkey wrench into my assumptions about John Steinbeck. 

Edited June 14, 2024 by The Laws of Biology
Added relevant remembrance about the film

[The Laws of Biology]

1. I have decided to buy old fashioned paper printed versions of Ayn Rand books.
2. I'll just underline and write notes in the margins, as people always did, and will type out any passages I especially want to preserve and pass along to friends.
3. I just don't trust e-books. They can disappear so suddenly. 

[Boydstun]

6 hours ago, The Laws of Biology said:

1. I saw the 1955 "East of Eden" film starring James Dean and directed by Elia Kazan (who also directed "On the Waterfront" as his defense for his ratting out Communists in Hollywood to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities). 
2. I don't recall that "East of Eden" film having any theme of heroic individualism in the vein of Ayn Rand.
3. I thought that "East of Eden" film was expressing a tragic sense of life, with people torn apart (torn from each other and divided within themselves) by their passions, greed, sexual lusts, violence, egotism, lies, secrets, and the desire to keep up appearances so as to stay in good graces with old fashioned Christian religious folk who tended to lead the local community.
4. The newly discovered mother of the two young men perhaps is depicted as an individualist, somewhat in the mode of an Ayn Rand character. But I didn't think the film presented her as especially or necessarily heroic or moral. I seem to recall that she owned and ran a house of prostitution.
5. And so, I was surprised to see that text above, from the Steinbeck novel, that does seem like it could almost have been written by Ayn Rand.
6. I always assumed that Steinbeck's novels promoted some sort of Socialism, or at least New Deal Liberalism, and not any sort of individualism.
7. This all throws a bit of monkey wrench into my assumptions about John Steinbeck. 

LB.

That movie was junk. In the book are great characters. James Dean was clueless about his character and the story. The mother of the boys shown in the film (Adam's wife) was drawn up by Steinbeck as an exemplar of wickedness. Earlier in the book, when as a teenager, she had locked her parents in the house and set it on fire and fled, leaving traces that she had been abducted (false), Steinbeck closes that chapter with the unforgettable words: "Kathy was a monster." If you ever have time for reading this masterpiece, go for it. I have not gotten to read much fiction in my life, due to needing to be reading nonfiction in science and philosophy for making my philosophy. The dozen or two novels I did get to read were great ones, and this one East of Eden is perhaps the blue ribbon. It is America. "The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."

[Boydstun]

This is only an aside. I said in the preceding comment: "This is America." Yes, in many ways, that is true, but there is  something important about America that is absent. The same element would be absent from Rand's Atlas Shrugged five years later (a more romanticizing sort of novel, aside from the realistic ugly evils by state policy and practice against human productivity and its prerequisites together with the philosophical ideas concordant with those evils ) : There are no Black Americans (though in AS there are principles championed that are at odds with the aggressions against Blacks by Whites going on in America at that time, ever since the Civil War, and in the earlier institution of slavery in some States).  

East of Eden is set in the aftermath of the Civil War and on through WWI. The settings for the story are in the Northeast and Northern California, where Steinbeck grew up. In this novel, the author at times will come to a more autobiographical report of what was going on in the area, supplementing the story unfolding for his characters at a particular time. For example, he mentions the hostility towards and persecution of German Americans in his CA area during the WWI era. I know this was true also in Oklahoma (my birthplace and place through college), as reported to me by my grandmother concerning specific episodes in the family (victims) in those years. (Steinbeck mentions that as an adult he is ashamed at his adolescent participation in these persecutions.) Maybe the enormous fear and hatred of Blacks by Whites in America was simply not a salient strand of America in Steinbeck's consciousness, and maybe Black-White race relations in his area of Salinas-King City were a lot better than in other regions of the country. (My OK history text for high school did not mention such things as the massacre in Tulsa or this. Modern times domestically were insinuated, by omission, to be more harmonious and reasonable than they were.) To be sure, there was some reporting of racial violence (and brinks of all-out race war) in newspapers outside the tinderbox regions. Maybe it seemed minor compared to other things reported in the newspapers. 

Edited June 15, 2024 by Boydstun