Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's why there are some of us who create properly proof-read and nicely formatted editions of the classics. Take a look at my uploads in the MR library.
|
We're off-topic here, so I'll keep this reply as brief as possible. Can you point me to a specific upload or two of yours that you're particularly proud of?
I tried to find some of your uploads but failed, there are just too many. I don't deny there are some properly done EPUB editions of classics, but they are more exceptions than the rule. Let me stress the problem is two-fold:
- typos and/or formatting
- bad source
It's often item no. 2 that causes modern EPUB editions to be not usable for serious literary scholars. The volunteer digitizers are admirable people, but they just frequently take whatever modern paper edition is most accessible to them, and digitize
that one. Unfortunately, it's rare that a truly
original edition is available to a volunteer digitizer (for reasons mentioned earlier). What typically happens, is that a
modernized edition of a classic gets digitized, making it not usable for literary scholarship. My pet peeve is "modernized" (I prefer to call it bastardized)
punctuation, with commas (and others) willfully removed from the original text or inserted into it, just to conform to some imaginary "modern standard" and its expectations.
I admit the crushing majority of e-book readers aren't literary scholars, and for them, meeting the criterion no. 1 above (no typos, nice formatting) is enough. Literary scholars, however (it's almost an affliction)
, need to see both criterion no. 1 and no. 2 fulfilled. Bad original source edition makes the EPUB edition unusable, no matter how pretty it looks. Which is why scholars are frequently only left with the option to read those unwieldy PDF files of photographed original editions.
