On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:

michael, i wish you would've taken the time to read what i actually wrote, instead of just giving your kneejerk reaction.

And if you weren't so jerkknee you would have realized I had to have read the whole thing to get to the part I quoted. . .duh! When you ask people to pay attention, it helps to PAY ATTENTION.

because your response doesn't address the point that i made.

It addresses EXACTLY the point you made that I quoted. . . . If that part contradicts your other points. . .sorry. . . . But having reread all of your comments, I don't see the change you say is there. . . .

i am loathe to get into this argument, because it won't mean a thing in the long run...  the future will have its own issues, and it will need to deal with them, and i laid it all out clearly.

but let me just address a few things, to provide some clarity.

...

   he fails to talk about the wide variety of Jane Austen's    p-books, and that paginations run rampant among them,    not to mention margination, spelling, etc.

there are different editions of many books, to be sure...

and i count each edition as a separate book.  your e-book will have to mimic _one_ of the editions in a faithful manner,

Then SAY that!!! Right up front in plain language!!! However, that still relegates us to being a Xerox machine, no?

or it will be discarded...  notice that when i say "mimic", i do _not_ mean that it has to match it _exactly_.  so, for instance, if you wanna close up spacey contractions, or correct spelling, or make other kinds of changes, they might (or might not) be totally acceptable to any one specific end-user in the future...

I'm never going to get into any of these semantic arguments!!!!!!! Mimic means to copy as closely as possible. . . . Synonym: copy.

but you _will_ have to make it easy for that specific end-user to _compare_ your e-book with a p-book, in order to spot changes.

As I have said before, if you would listen, I am not AGAINST keeping a copy with such pagination for such purposes, but I draw the lines, pun intended, at keeping every character in the same page position when there is no need for pages, in all available PG editions. I want our eBooks to be optimally readable: Minimal end of line hyphenation. No page headers or footers. Just plain reading. Once again, I have no stance AGAINST people who want pagination, I just don't want for force any such arbitrary formats on anyone and neither should you or anyone else. STOP TRYING TO FORCE YOUR OPINIONS ON OTHERS, MAKE THEM OPTIONS!

i've shown how this comparison is done, by mounting a web-page which has the text on one side of the screen, the scan on the other.

As I have always said, I have no objection to this in proofreading, just in real reading. . .but I am willing for it to be an OPTION!!!

but if your e-book is a formless blob, that's not gonna cut it...

Tell that to the millions of people who prefer remargination to the specifications of their own systems.

and, for the record, i'm most certainly _not_ recommending that we create some "scholarly" version of our books.  i laugh at that. the _only_ thing we know about the scholars of the future is that we do _not_ know what they will want and it'd be foolish to guess.

I CAN tell you that most of the paper editions' page numbers will fade along with the hyphenation.

put yourself in the shoes of the future.  you have a dozen different e-book files, all purporting to be copies of "sense and sensibility".

you know that some of them have been doctored, and others have been bowdlerized, and you _hope_ that some of them are accurate.

Last time I looked there were still pretty ubiquitous programs to lay out all such differences. IFF you have such deep interests, you can simply put up two editions side by side when you look at them. . .I do. . . . If not, then you aren't really that interested. . .it's all smoke.

you can, with some work, find the differences between them, but you'd prefer not to have to go through that exercise if you could, because you'd have to then do more work to find the _right_ copy.

"_RIGHT_" copy??? Now you've contradicted yourself back into the ivory tower. . . . "_RIGHT_" copy, indeeeeed. . . .

so, how do you proceed?

well, i can tell you that if _one_ of those copies made it _simple_ for you to verify its accuracy by assuming the form of the p-book, that will be your obvious first choice.  think about it.  you'll agree.

This will ONLY do you any good if you manage to find that edition, out of all the other paper editions in the world.

so, michael, if you want to respond to this, answer that question.

Sorry, but I anticipated ALL of these questions when I first started, and have answered, and will continue to answer, at length. Why can't you just propose your ideas as OPTIONS, not CARVED IN STONE? Michael