[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

(after writing this I noticed it may look argumentative or confrontational, but that wasn't my intent: take it with interspersed smileys and as a tongue-in-cheek comment)

Ditto on my reply, too, actually! I was thinking afterwards that perhaps I might have come across as "confrontational" as well -- ha ha.

I would say your changes don't qualify as derivative works, because the apparently don't "add new original copyrightable authorship to that work". Note that even if the selection is copyrighted, "the copyright in a compilation of data extends only to the selection, coordination or arrangement of the materials or data, but not to the data itself".

You bring up a good quote from that article, but note the sentence that comes right after that one:

"In the case of a collective work containing 'preexisting works' — works that were previously published, previously registered, or in the public domain — the registration will only extend to the selection, coordination or arrangement of those works, not to the preexisting works themselves."

Unless I'm reading that wrong, then I would think that "selection, coordination or arrangement of those works" would indeed mean not only which plays and poems of Shakespeare's (in this particular case) that I choose to use in my book, but "coordination and arrangement" would also mean the coding of it, the typography and layout of it, etc., too. So that would be copyrightable (although, as you say, laws vary from country to country).

Also, there are various other books ("e" and otherwise) and also websites out there that have copied the First Folio texts verbatim -- including all the really rather obvious spelling errors that aren't just variations in spelling, but simply booboos of the typesetters in those olde-time binderies -- and it's these latter (among other things) that I endeavoured to fix up. I should think that that would be worthy of merit enough to be copyrightable.

(To use another example, a previous collection of ebooks that I did was of Henry David Thoreau's writings. While I used public domain versions of those, over the last few decades Princeton University has been working on THE most "authoritative" versions of his works, poring over his texts and fixing up any errors and omissions, etc. -- much, much more work than I've put into this book of mine, of course, but nobody would say that they don't deserve credit and copyright for their efforts simply because the original texts are all in the public domain.)

With all that said, to Harry's reply now...

Originally Posted by HarryT

My honest advice would be that if the thought of someone redistributing your book worries you, don't upload it (and I say that as someone who's created hundreds of ebooks and seen them copied and resold by unscrupulous people out to make a fast buck). Once you upload it to any public site like MR, it's no longer in your control.

That's really very, very disheartening, actually. I've put in so much time and effort into this Shakespeare book, and I'm really very happy with how it's turned out (I think I'm pretty much done now, anyway) and the forums -- and people -- here have been of so much invaluable help to me. I would love to just simply share what I did... but there are certain aspects of my book that are fairly "new" and not easily available elsewhere. For example, I created a brand-new digital version of Robert Chester's Love's Martyr book in its entirety, which has only very rarely ever been printed anywhere, and I was only able to find a single other ebook version of on amazon -- and I wouldn't be surprised if that one looks like crap. I created mine from scratch, poring over every single line, every word, every letter, and taking the rather wacky formatting of the original and transforming it into one that works for ebooks. I would really, really hate for someone else to just come along, steal my code, and then start selling it elsewhere.

And so it's really too bad, that this is the case here. I was going to put it up on the iTunes Store and give it away for free there, but at least there they add the (admittedly-nominal) protection of DRM. It's a shame we're not "allowed" to share links to our books from other places (iTunes, amazon, off a personal website or whatever the case might be), if that's the only place for people to get them -- indeed, I've probably broken the rules already here by even mentioning that I'm "going to" make my book available on iTunes for free, without even giving a link.

Oh well.