Karen Lofstrom wrote:
At DP, we're processing things that no one but a scholar will ever read. Ever. I'm proofreading one of Canon Sells' books about Islam. No one who is interested in current, up-to-date information is going to read this book. It's antiquated.
The Koran makes the Top 20 of our downloads and is much older.
However, some scholar working on a book re "history of Western perceptions of Islam" might be thrilled to get access to an old out-of-print work. If he/she feels the work is reliable, that is.
The problem lieth not within PG. It lieth within Academia. Academia has to adapt its methods and processes to the new world where information resources are ephemeral. If you cite a dead tree edition of something you are quite confident that the cited text stays put. It wont change its wording or glide from the cited page into the next etc. If you cite an electronic resource you have no such confidence. How do you make sure that the text at the url you cite will not be edited or removed? You cannot. How do you make sure the medium you cite will still be readable in some years? In a hundred years reading a CDROM may be harder than it was to read the rosetta stone.
If you don't want to cater to scholars, you're throwing away much of DP's work.
Its not our problem. Any amount of catering will not do away with Academias percieved "limitations" of electronic media. The best value for Academia (and the least work for us) would be just to include the page scans. Any transcription you make will fall short of the requirements of some scholar. I think we should use our time for producing more books for a general audience instead than producing Academia-certified editions of them. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org