Review of "The Wealth of Networks" in the TLS

This week's Times Literary Supplement has a review of "The Wealth of Networks" by Yochai Benkler. The book mentions Project Gutenberg. Of more immediate interest is what the reviewer has to say about Project Gutenberg. The relevant part of the review is quoted below. The reviewer is Paul Duguid, Visiting Professor at the School of Information and Management Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. 'Given their openness, both Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia are surprisingly good and unsurprisingly bad. Some thirty years in the making, Gutenberg offers about 17,000 "etexts". Many seem unexceptional, but for some the need to avoid copyright entanglements has led contributors to resurrect editions that were better left buried. Its version of Pan, the novel by Nobel-Prizewinner Knut Hamsun, for example, puts William Wurster's ridiculously prudish translation of 1921 before unsuspecting readers. Relying on a communications medium admired for its ability to "route around censorship", yet driven by a certain contempt for scholarship, Project Gutenberg threatens to make a number of poor editions - some bowdlerized, some originally corrupt, and some newly corrupted for the new medium - the internet standard.' -- Philip Baker
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Philip Baker