I love curly quotation marks. They're so round and inviting. I also love free e-books, and so have been delighted by Tor's current free–e-book–each–week program. Perhaps by Tor my loves may be joined? But alas not – the HTML versions Tor provides have ASCII quotation marks, and when I asked if this could be rectified was told “I'm afraid the quotation-mark conversion has to stay.”
So for Robert Charles Wilson’s
Spin I rolled up my crazy-sleeves, pulled out by regexps, and fixed them myself. Every last one. And modified the CSS and some of the markup to much more more closely resemble the formatting in the PDF version. Then wrapped it up as a valid .epub book. Then converted/tweaked to produce a great-looking Sony Reader BBeB book.
And they’re all for only me! Nope, can’t give them to you. The power of copyright compels me! I can add those curly quotes myself because I have the source HTML to start with. If I start handing people my curly-quoted version I have no means to stop it from falling into new hands which didn’t already have the straight-from-Tor edition.
Or do I?
I could provide you with a grid of just the byte offsets of the various curly quotes. Some extreme variant of diff/patch in which nothing of the original copyrighted text persists. It would contain just my curly quotes, owned by me under copyright law and free to give you as I wish. You provide the straight-from-Tor e-book, mix in my curly quotes and poof! – you have a be-curled edition of
Spin. But this doesn’t work for format-shifting over compression, encoding changes, etc., where “put a curly quote here” ceases to makes sense.
Unless we distill the idea down to the lowest level – what is XOR but the difference between two bits?
Let’s try an experiment, which I’m calling Obelisk[1]. Download the following files:
Then get your copy of WilsonSpin_HTML.zip handy, pop open your favorite shell, and run:
Code:
python obelisk.py Mohm5pei WilsonSpin_HTML.zip Mohm5pei#WilsonSpin_HTML.zip#Spin.epub.obelisk Spin.epub
python obelisk.py AhZe5shu WilsonSpin_HTML.zip AhZe5shu#WilsonSpin_HTML.zip#Spin.lrf.obelisk Spin.lrf
The results should be curly-quoted .epub and BBeB versions of
Spin, seamlessly merging Tor’s bits with mine into unified wholes.
Let me know what you think.
[1] Obelisk is similar to and inspired by a “project” called
Monolith, although with rather different goals.