michael, i wish you would've taken the time to read what i
actually wrote, instead of just giving your kneejerk reaction.

because your response doesn't address the point that i made.

i am loathe to get into this argument, because it won't mean
a thing in the long run...  the future will have its own issues,
and it will need to deal with them, and i laid it all out clearly.

but let me just address a few things, to provide some clarity.

>   he fails to talk about the wide variety of Jane Austen's
>   p-books, and that paginations run rampant among them,
>   not to mention margination, spelling, etc.

there are different editions of many books, to be sure...

and i count each edition as a separate book.  your e-book
will have to mimic _one_ of the editions in a faithful manner,
or it will be discarded...  notice that when i say "mimic", i do
_not_ mean that it has to match it _exactly_.  so, for instance,
if you wanna close up spacey contractions, or correct spelling,
or make other kinds of changes, they might (or might not) be
totally acceptable to any one specific end-user in the future...

but you _will_ have to make it easy for that specific end-user to
_compare_ your e-book with a p-book, in order to spot changes.

i've shown how this comparison is done, by mounting a web-page
which has the text on one side of the screen, the scan on the other.

but if your e-book is a formless blob, that's not gonna cut it...

and, for the record, i'm most certainly _not_ recommending that
we create some "scholarly" version of our books.  i laugh at that.
the _only_ thing we know about the scholars of the future is that
we do _not_ know what they will want and it'd be foolish to guess.

put yourself in the shoes of the future.  you have a dozen different
e-book files, all purporting to be copies of "sense and sensibility".
you know that some of them have been doctored, and others have
been bowdlerized, and you _hope_ that some of them are accurate.
you can, with some work, find the differences between them, but
you'd prefer not to have to go through that exercise if you could,
because you'd have to then do more work to find the _right_ copy.

so, how do you proceed?

well, i can tell you that if _one_ of those copies made it _simple_
for you to verify its accuracy by assuming the form of the p-book,
that will be your obvious first choice.  think about it.  you'll agree.

so, michael, if you want to respond to this, answer that question.

-bowerbird