"Her Serene Highness" writes:

However- and this is a big however- PG is not 'publishing' books. It's copying them. There is no PG publishing house that is making decisions on whether something is worth publishing or not.

Yes, there is. The people of PG as a whole decide whether something is worth publishing or not. There are many books that the people of PG have decided they aren't worth publishing for right now, because they are too hard to scan, too hard to process, too expensive or too hard to get a copy of, etc.

Textual clues do not live only in words. A book comes alive in typeface, and in word placement on a page.

I've seen a grand total of two modern books that used the long-s and weren't facsimile copies, and one of those only used the long-s to replicate the original title pages, not the original text. Several of the facsimile editions have been upfront about the fact that they do what they do for cost reasons, not because it's better.

Saving a book while divorcing it from its index, illustrations, typefont, and so on is not 'saving' it. It's a decontextualization.

If you want an original copy, go find it. But every new publication decontextualizes the books. Somehow Beowulf readers are willing to deal with editions that look nothing like the original, that lack its illustrations, its typeface. I've handled books printed in Germany in the mid-18th century, and it's an experience in some ways. But that doesn't mean that I insist that reprints be printed in old-style German fonts on rag paper.

A book may be perfectly good reading material- but an ebook printed in Courier (which is very hard to read),

Then don't print it in Courier. That choice is left to you.

perhaps missing its original illustrations, without an index that shows the manner in which the author's or editor's mind worked- is no longer the original book.

No, it's not. We don't have matter copiers to replicate the original book.

I recall the cry that vinyl was going the way of the dinosaur- yet it has not. In fact, the MP3 player is the new vinyl-

Vinyl has gone the way of the dinosaur; I think it's down to less than 0.5% of the new material sold is on vinyl, and that in a few limited genres. The MP3 may be the "new vinyl", but it's not vinyl.

However, Napster technology is not better in the long run than a record- CDs and computer memory degrade at an alarming rate.

Records are degraded the instant they're pressed, are impossible to copy, and degrade while playing. Napster made backups on a million computers in a few days. You can manually make backups easily, and take them in the car or while jogging. You seem like you're looking for reasons to attack new technology. It has its faults, but I think the complete superseding of records by CDs is good evidence that CDs are overall better than records.

Books aren't dead either, and people who think books are about finding passages in less than 25 seconds are missing the point of why people read

That was a challenge you made.

People read because they want a total experience - computers don't feel like paper. They don't smell. The text is usually flat and more difficult to read. Some of this will change over time- but not all of it, thank the Lord.

That's absurd. People read for a million reasons; there is no one point of why people read. Some readings are for entertainment, some readings are because there's nothing else to do on a long trip, some are of whole books for detailed information, some are of one page for a little piece of information. Yes, some people prefer to read on paper for those things that will never be replicated on computer, but we aren't going into libraries and taking books off the shelves.

(copying things and leaving out some of the vitals doesn't constitute puplishing in most people's minds, or at least not in a good way, no matter that info techies might want to think)

My library has dozens of little brown books in a series called "Handy Literal Translations", where they took older translations, dumped most of the plays or speeches, and published them in a handy portable form. Or how about the Augustan Reprint Society which frequently reprinted only the introduction, or select essays from various volumes?

libraries don't cut the covers and publishing info off their books to make more room on the shelves,

Right, they put them on microfilm and throw the newspapers away. My mother has a signed Mark Twain that the library was getting rid of, and someone on DP bought boxes of books at the Sydney University bookfest at $5 a piece. Don't tell me that libraries don't get rid of books. As for the covers, in many academic libraries, a number of books have had their covers removed and replaced with a library binding. I rarely see dust jackets on library books, especially not in university libraries. Decontextualization galore.

they include books of criticism,

How many books of criticism do you usually find in a library of 10,000 to 15,000 books? It's not like we don't include books of criticism, it's just that we don't have many yet.

Whether they understand how people use books or why- well, I seriously doubt that some people here have thought about that.

Right, all these people who love books so much that they would spend their volunteer time working on scanning them and proofing them don't know how people use books or why. They just love books from a distance; they don't actually use them. Furthermore, I don't think you understand how people use ebooks or why. You spend a lot of time in criticism, but a lot of it just wrong. You told us we couldn't find a quote in a large body of text, you tell us that typeface is important when no printed book cares, you complain that an ebook in Courier is hard to read, which is a bit like saying that it's hard to read this book because it's upside down.

its incomaptibilty with WP and vice versa makes life tough on those who do.

Have you ever tried learning Word? Your gripes sound like someone who learned WordPerfect and never bothered to learn Word. To which, may I ask again, that you conform to the standard email quoting standard and trim irrelevant text that you aren't replying to? There are rules which have developed over time for the ease of communication via email, which may at some points be arbitary, but everyone adhering to the standard facilites communicating. Your ignoring of these rules make me feel that it's less of a communication and more your demanding that the computer world bend entirely to conform to your little world. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm