Let me note, I had no way of telling Greg's comments apart from yours except for context. Perhaps you relied on some HTML thing; please don't do so. I'm not going to argue the wisdom of HTML email, but HTML email that does not degrade nicely to plain text is going to look awful to many of the recievers. "Her Serene Highness" writes:
But a citation of an out of print book in anthropology, English literature, the hard scieces, et al, which might very well not be correct in its information- that will be problematic.
But this has nothing to do with etexts; this has to do with older books.
I would be very happy to see Boas online. Eventually I hope to track down an out of copywright version of his writings and scan it for PG.
It'll be a long time, unless you move to Canada. The last of his works are out of print for another 7 years in the EU and 33 years in the US. The Bureau of American Ethnology volumes are being worked on up to 1930 (since it's a US government publication) and I believe that includes some work by Boas.
In chapter 5 there might be a very quotable sentence- but what my student doesn't know is that this sentence was changed in later editions. And there's no page number- does he tell his teacher to read the entire chapter to find a sentence that won't be there in a later edition?
What is he supposed to do, give a page reference to one of a dozen editions that might be very hard for the teacher to find? With etexts, you know that your recipent has access to the same edition you have. And as someone else pointed out, if you quote the sentence, the context can be found in seconds.
After all, I have no idea who JM Rodwell was, or whether his translation of The Koran is the definitive English version, or why his translation was chosen- other than that his book was out of copyright. From my point of view, that's a red flag itself. If this translation is so superb, why isn't it still being used- or is it?
And how do I know that if I pull it off the library shelves? My college library has a half dozen different translations of the Koran; how am I to know which are in use? As for the reason it's not being used, I would suggest that the fact that academics like to retranslate everything every decade might be an explanation. My class used a modern translation of the Iliad, but that doesn't mean that in several hundred years of English translation of the work that's now public domain, there's not one competent, even superb translation.
Nietzsche's work for instance, was butchered by his sister. There are conflicting copies of his work floating around. When his works were copied for Project Gutenberg, did someone go for an out of copyright copy that is definitive, or one that his sister chopped up? Did that matter, or was it just more important to get a copy up?
I doubt that the people who scanned it were aware of the differences. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm