On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Jonathan Ingram wrote:
--- Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org> wrote:
As for identifying the eBooks with a particular paper edition, I think this should only be done in specific cases where the editions are known to be substantially different for reasons given in the newer editions.
We did this with Darwin, Shakespeare, etc., but I don't see the need to do it in cases in which the differences are all likely to be in typographical errors, margination, pagination, and other publishing items, rather than in the source material.
Most of us at DP disagree with you on this, and happily the whitewashers are now keeping the edition information that we add to the files we produce, instead of removing it. An increasing number of DP-produced texts (and, since DP produces the overwhelming majority of content contributed to PG, an increasing number of PG's recent texts) make note of edition information and page numbers at the very least. Hopefully once we move to the next iteration of our proofreading process we will be able to keep more information -- including markup of words/phrases which are missing or otherwise hard to read in the original.
Several of DP's content providers, myself included, intend over the new few years to find decent editions of works already in PG, but which are not in a state that we would find acceptable if we were proofreading it ourselves (this includes most of the first few thousand texts). Hopefully over time we can update all PG's content to a standard we're happy with.
-- Jon Ingram
There is room for nearly everyone in Project Gutenberg. . . . DP is more than encouraged to keep working with this philosophy. This does not stop our encouragement of others who work on eBooks with other philosophies. We are currently hoping to increase our level of cooperation with Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive [of which I was once the only surviving member when it was nearly extinct] & with John Mark Ockerbloom's Online Book Pages. Some of their books we can undoubtedly work on to increase the standards as mentioned above, but quite possibly it would be more polite to do it through their sites first or in some kind of simultanous release of new eBooks. . .and let them make the decision what relationship the new versions should have to the old. Michael