Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertDDL
Sorry, this exactly is my aim, and I don't see why it shouldn't be.
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You said, in one of your original posts, that you treat dead authors exactly as you do living--which says to me that you're not exactly cleaning up the OCR; you're
imposing upon it your own standards. You're rewriting it,
as an editor would do if he were working with a living author.
But this client
isn't alive. He's
not here to accept or reject your suggestions. He's dead. This isn't a working partnership; it's an imposition of what you think "should" be, over what the author/publisher thought it should be in the first place.
If you want to take some PD book and create your own edition thereof, your own view of it, I guess that's your prerogative, just as there are a thousand publishers out there with P&P "continuations" or "variations," etc. but to me, there is a
massive distinction between republishing a digital, cleaned-up version of Pride & Prejudice and a rewritten version.
I mean, hell, really--what's the difference if you clean up the language in P&P, or grammar, or whatever, versus
rewriting the ending? Some arguments about
"degree"?
I'm genuinely
not being argumentative; I'm asking. Given that the author has died and is not here to argue with you over what you're deciding on his/her behalf, at what point does it
stop being the PD book?
Jellby argues that we don't "know" the author's intent--but the one damn thing we do have is the actual, physical book from which the scans were made. At some point, we have to make certain assumptions and to me, if a book has made it into print, that gives it
some degree of gravitas. If naught else, someone, somewhere, put some amount of hard-earned into the publication, which in and of itself, created some amount of "rights."
Hitch