On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Jon Noring wrote:
Michael Hart wrote:
In addition, I should add the pretty much ALL the original PG eBooks came from multiple editions, simply to do better error checking.
How many of the PG texts fall into the category "the original PG eBooks"?
Who knows?
There is, of course, a difference between consulting other sources to clarify a few things with the text derived from the primary source, and simply kludging together a bunch of different editions to form a "new edition".
Of cource, this get's into a scholarly world I've tried to avoid all these years, as per the suggestions of my father, who was a great Shakespeare professor. We don't want to get into such scholarly arguments as how to punctuate "To be, or note to be." Obviously, any scholar will be able to figure out which editions we have used without much effort, and those who are not scholars won't care which editions we used because they don't care if it is: "To be or not to be." "To be, or not to be." "To be; or not to be." or "To be: or not to be." To them, that is not the question, and a discussion of that question would shuffle them off this mortal coil into the land of dreams.
An example of how things got out of whack with the "original PG texts" is Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", where there are two quite different editions, and the version at PG is not even marked as to which edition it conforms with.
As for this example, the person who did it first may not have had any idea of the difference in the second. . .that's the purview of the person who does it second. . .they can expound on the differences in the second, and even attach such to the first file. 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. Michael