Marcello wrote:
Michael Hart wrote:
How much harder is it to make an eBook set up to answer all these scholarly and reference questions, than just to read?
Providing source information and page numbers is easy. So it is to provide the page scans. Of course: page scans != ebook.
Marking up a book to satisfy most scholarly requirements is more work than I would care for, short of being paid to do it.
1) There are *reasonable* basic requirements, which are not onerous at all, that can be made to make the PG corpus of texts much more useful to academia and scholars. Here are a few that come to mind: a) Provide full catalog info for the source of the digital text. b) Provide the complete set of page scans. (I'm still of the opinion this should be a requirement, with the allowance that scans need not be provided under several defined circumstances.) c) In markup in the Master copy, add markers (plus maybe XLinks) to page breaks found in the source. 2) Any 21st century digital repository of texts should allow the ability of users to annotate, reference, and interlink the texts. This can be done without altering the texts themselves. Thus, the digital repository will do things that no traditional academic library of atomic-based artifacts can do. Thus, scholars themselves will improve the texts to meet their needs -- we need not do everything for them if we give them the tools to do it themselves. Jon Noring