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.
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.
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. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.