On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
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.
Actually, Project Gutenberg eBooks have proven much less ephemeral than paper books published in the same period, as all of the Project Gutenberg eBooks have been available continuously from their first day of release, while most paper books from over 5 years ago are no longer in print.
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.
But only if you find the exact same paper edition.
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.
Actually, it's pretty easy to find all the original Project Gutenberg eBooks, as well as the newer versions, because so many places keep them, usually in the thousands for any of our eBooks that have been out for even a week.
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.
There are SO many copies of each Project Gutenberg eBook out there that the question of a particular medium becomes irrelevant. . .when you download a copy of Huck Finn, you never know at your end whether it is stored on a CDROM, DVD, RAID, Terabrick, or even a floppy. Most of you don't realize that less then 20 years ago our eBooks were available from my BBS, and that the entire BBS ran on hi-density floppy drives. The fact that the eBooks are independent of the medium, and of hardware or software requirements in "Unlimited Distribution" is what makes them last longer than anything else on the entire Internet. Where else can you find files that were originally posted 33 years ago? Michael