On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 4:21 PM, David Starner
<prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 3:47 PM, don kretz <dakretz@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yet we know
> there are major, well-known titles that are not available. My own
> projects, the volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica edition (the most
> renowned and most recently public-domain-available,) is not online
> in any quality digital form. There is no digital copy of Newton's
> Principia Mathematica in the English language. No copy of Ptolemy's
> Almagest.
And these all clash with the demands that we don't work on scholarly
or hard works.
That's a stupid demand. Whatever we do is going to clash with a demand
from someone.
> Nearly every page of Encyclopedia Britannica is thick with both
> bibliographies, and with articles about authors and texts that are
> largely undigitized. I imagine many of them are already lost.
I would bet not 1 in a 1,000. I think you're vastly underestimating
the quality of libraries in the US and UK; if nothing else, they have
warehoused every book of the type that EB has referenced. If an author
or text was important enough to get an EB article, if it existed at
the time, it still exists.
Unresolved. I know that, much more often than I would expect, I can
google for books or authors or place names or events, and the only
matches I get are from various Encyclepaedia Britannica texts. Often
enough it's a wikipedia article taken verbatim from EB 1911.
> the
> known fact that books are disappearing from our reach daily.
The known fact? In the history of PG, I've only seen books become more
accessible. The volumes I did for PG that I would be most concerned
about losing completely, Oklahoma Sunshine, is held by 18 libraries,
and 5 outside Oklahoma. The poetry pamphlets I did might be more in
danger, but I don't remember their names, and I feel a little guilty
about wasting people's time on them.
I'll see what others say; but even anyway, don't you think that English language
societies are outliers in this regard?
--
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
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