Just a quick addendum (though I'm not sure if it fits Michael's mold): I've received about a dozen requests to remove or expurgate our Rodwell translations of the Koran. These have all come from folks who believed his introduction to the text to be offensive. FWIW. -- Greg On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 09:04:37AM -0800, Michael Hart wrote:
On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Michael Dyck wrote:
Michael Hart wrote:
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Michael Dyck wrote:
It sounds like this is talking about cases where there's discussion about whether to post a submission as a single ebook or as multiple parts (or both). Whereas I thought we were talking about cases where someone advocates the removal of a submission (or the replacement of one with another). Do you see these as the same issue? They seem quite different to me.
Sorry, I should have been more specific about these examples.
In many case people wanted to delete files we were offering or preparing to offer, or to move all of a certain class of work into one single file, and delete the individual files. This sort of discussion happens more often than you might think.
Right. I understand that there can be debate about -- whether PG has the legal right to post a work, and -- the best way to package a (long or multi-part) work, but neither of these sounds particularly Orwellian.
What I was talking about, and what (it seems) you were talking about when you started this thread (about "rewriting history"), was the removal of existing PG texts, and their replacement by different texts (i.e., different editions, not just a repackaging of the same content). You gave the example of ebook #100, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, whose removal was recently suggested, and analogized this to the hypothetical submission of the Britannica 11th this year, only to have it removed in a decade.
So, leaving aside cases where someone says "You don't have the necessary permission to put that work online", or "This work would be better split into parts / joined into one", do you have examples (like ebook #100) where someone has advocated the removal of an existing PG text, and (optionally) its replacement by a significantly different text?
The most obvious examples have been, approximately chronlogically:
The Bill of Rights, to be subsumed into either The Constitution, or into the complete amendments, back when we were considering separate files for all three. I didn't want to erase the history that the entire Constitution had been deemed too large in the 70s.
Frankenstein, some people really hated a particularly bad edition. I don't want to pretend that bad editions don't exist, or that they might have been the only edition available to the original volunteer. I am only too happy to write notes about this in the books and index, but don't want to sweep the whole idea under the carpet. There have always been those who say only their favorite edition should be posted. BTW, this is often a much larger problem with translations, which I did not include much in my list.
Shakespeare and The Britannica are obviously the two most recent major examples, and another major example was Darwin. Luckily we had a Darwin expert who insisted on keeping the various editions.
As for the recent request to delete Shakespeare #100, I never heard back from my reply, so I never got to the bottom line reasoning behind that request. Perhaps it was only because of copyright, or because it was such an early effort that it needed proofing to bring it up to today's standards.
In either case, I don't like the idea of people suggesting we delete files for either reason.
As for the Britannica, there have been such wide and varied discussions on this across listservers that there is probably too much to discuss. I haven't insisted that we continue with the Britannica, it was mostly to prove such a thing could be done when we did the first volume, and there are now other source. I would suggest we eventually use one or more of the other sources so we don't create more work for ourselves, but I would never agree that such a seminal work be deleted.
People have suggested that some kind of "Reader Advisory" be included, but I don't notice them saying the same thing about Mark Twain, Darwin, or any other works. Perhaps their concern is that the eBook version might be confused with more modern editions. This could possibly be remedied with a statement in each file stating that these articles were written by experts about what they had learned 100 years ago.
Personally, _I_ would LOVE to see some comparison between what was thought of as "fact" or "best theory" over periods of time, but I would not approve of sweeping those under the carpet.
Oh, a bit more on Shakespeare, I think there was also a discussion on whether we should include the First Folio, since it is full of originaly typography and other difficulties. . .but since it was such as seminal work, we decided to include it.
As for translations, obviously there there were unauthorized editions of most of Jules Verne, some just horrible, and I actually agreed not to use one of those, even though I had personally typed half of it in.
There is also great, and worthwhile, concern about the Longfellow translation of Dante. However, it is also an example that should be preserved as an indication of history, even if we recommend the Cary translation or any other as being of better quality.
I would tend to include both the authorized and unauthorized editions, even, or especially, of such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin, which became the first million-seller, perhaps ONLY because of unauthorized editions.
In most of these cases, I prefer to keep the doors open wide, perhaps with warnings, rather than to keep them either closed, or make the readers go through several doorways to find what we have.
Thanks!
Michael
PS
BTW, I forgot to mention at least one other example before, the NUSIRG manual. . .we were asked to delete the plain text version. . .at the request of the copyright holder. We considered making an issue of it, since this was the era when the major players were trying to eliminate plain text altogether, but, in the end, we decided that would hurt our future relationships with donors more than it would help in the preservation of plain text. Of course, now nearly everyone can read the file in plain text without the help of all the work we/I did in the conversion. [And this one was VERY difficult to convert, if you take a look.]
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