"Michael Dyck" writes:

By the way, I'm curious as to why D. Starner would like to get rid of those editions. Are they particularly bad/questionable for some reason?

They're copyrighted, and PG has generally discouraged, for good reason, copyrighted editions of public domain works. From what Michael Hart said, I got the impression that it was an early 1930s edition; hence it does the other thing that annoys PGers to no end, adding a new copyright to material with no new copyrightable material. And if the edition really is so much better than the public domain ones, there should be something on the files talking about the edition, instead of it just looking like someone else digitalized a public domain edition and decided to give PG a copyright with a new copyright on it.

...

Would someone be willing to do all the work to donate a Britannica 11th to Project Gutenberg this year if they thought it would be removed from Project Gutenberg a decade after it was first included?

Yes, I would. And if you ask "Why would you go to all that effort, only to have the results deleted in 10 years?", I would point out that it would only be PG's copy that's deleted; the results of my work would live on, elsewhere on the web.

/* 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. */ Any person's actions are ultimately ephemeral. Most effort in the real world goes to the completely ephemeral; most of the rest, blogs and garage bands and writers trying to create the Great American Novel, will be disappear not long after it was created without even creating a ripple on the sea of life. Kubla Khan, the work of a couple hours spent as high as a kite, is interesting; the poetry of most college students, even stuff labored over for months, isn't. It doesn't matter how much work went into it; what matters is useful results. Speaking personally, I've got scans of several books on my hard drive that turned out to already be in progress. I shrug my shoulders and go on; that some part of my work will turn out to be for naught is inevitable. In the process of producing a German translation of Alice in Wonderland, I have scanned new versions of the Tenniel illustrations, as the previous ones are too small to capture the detail, and we can afford larger file sizes nowadays. If someone in ten years decides to produce the definitive version of the Tenniel illustrations and push aside my edition, then so be it; I certainly won't take it personally. If something of mine has to be redone or deleted, then it has to be redone or deleted. I certainly don't advocate the widescale wasting of work that's already done, but I don't agree with the argument that we should keep something of no value because someone put work into. But I certainly seem to be a minority voice here. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm