ok, so there's a new e-book viewer-program in town. liza daly, who is affiliated with the o'reilly folks, has brought out "ibisreader" for your reading enjoyment. so i went to check it out... at ibisreader.com, i clicked "get started" and then -- at "add a book" -- "feedbooks: popular public domain". the 4th book down is "alice's adventures in wonderland", and since the movie is coming out this friday, i got that. feedbooks, as you probably know, is a site that takes e-books from various sources, like project gutenberg, and makes some very nice-looking versions of them... since feedbooks re-works the books, they don't have as many books as some of the other sites, but they are preferred by many people because their books look nice. so i start looking at the text, and i find this:
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
well, gee. if you're intimately familiar with this book, you know
took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, is a phrase that is _italicized_ in the book. but not on this file...
here's where you can see a copy of the original:
http://www.archive.org/stream/alicesadventur00carr#page/2/mode/2up
you'll have to take my word for it that it's not italicized in the feedbooks copy that is being used by ibisreader, since i don't see any convenient way for me to link to a specific page there. (but it's book #22 from feedbooks, if you wanna look yourself.) it's pretty clear that what has happened here is that feedbooks has taken pg#11 and used it as its source. what is a sad thing, because -- even after all the years it coulda been "improved" -- pg#11 _still_ doesn't have proper italics in it. it was "updated" in 2005 (leaving no trace behind) and then once again in 2008 (when an .html version was added). but it still has zero italics.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt
the p.g. version _does_ have italics rendered as all-uppercase. so there is _some_ indication of them. but this is ambiguous, since there are places in the book where uppercase is used too:
http://www.archive.org/stream/alicesadventur00carr#page/4/mode/2up (see the reference to "orange marmalade", in all-uppercase.)
if i would've been feedbooks, i would've converted _all_ of the uppercased words to italics. but of course then they would've been changing things like chapter headers and first-words too. and of course, feedbooks could've _left_ words in all-uppercase. i don't know why they didn't, but i assume it's because they take _pride_ in their typography, and all-uppercase looks like crap... (but it's true that the tell-tale examples of _actual_ uppercase, namely "orange marmalade", "drink me", and "eat me", are all still rendered in uppercase in feedbooks#22, so i am stumped.) and yes, folks, i know there are other versions of "alice" posted, including some with italics correctly specified. so let us look... pg#19033 _does_ have italics in it, but it does _not_ italicize the phrase about the rabbit, and his watch, and his pocket... whether it's a version-difference -- it _is_ another version -- or whether it's just a digitization mistake, i simply don't know. (and since this is clearly not the explanation for the feedbooks discrepancies, i have no interest in determining the reasons.) pg#928 -- an .html version only -- _does_ have italics. yay! pg#28885 also has the italics, and it has the images as well! although sometimes things don't go right, as shown here:
the feedbooks version has _no_ italics at all, as far as i can see, not even the different set of italics from pg#19033. so, at first, i had thought they'd used pg#11 as their source text, but now, i'm not so sure. (they have some strange contractions, which could indicate that they might've done their own digitization.) at any rate, the point still stands that pg#11 lacks proper italics. all-uppercase is _not_ a substitute. and since the italics _have_ been done -- in pg#928 -- the changes should be incorporated into pg#11. the presence of other versions, at higher numbers, won't change the fact that pg#11 is considered as "the original." so, c'mon, let's see someone who talks about pg/dp "quality" and "incremental improvement" actually _back_up_ the claim. let's get this classic and legendary e-text cleaned up now, ok? -bowerbird