[Psymon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You're confusing knowledge with creativity: they aren't the same thing. You may indeed need to be an expert in late 16th / early 17th century orthography to be able to make the corrections you describe,

Well, I may not have letters at the end of my name to "prove" it, but it is a subject that I've been very, very interested in since childhood (I'm 53 now), so it's not like I've been talkin' outta my hat here. Indeed, the very first ebook that I published was a work of my own, split into two parts -- the first part in modern English, the second part with the same text written in late-Middle English. For this Shakespeare book, I have three versions of my "Publisher's Prologue" -- the main one, at the front of the book, is written in the style of Elizabethan English (to go with the rest of the book), and then in an appendix I have the same text in modern English (for people who have trouble with the Elizabethan version) and then, just for fun, also a rather wackier-to-read late-Middle English version.

but that doesn't mean that such corrections have any element of creativity to them.

Depends on how narrow your definition of "creativity" is -- if all you're talking about is something that's blatantly "eye-popping" and obvious (like, say, if I were to do up all the texts in hand-painted calligraphy and the make a book of scanned images or something), then of course you're going to dismiss anything that's less-obvious and harder-to-find.

But in my book (no pun intended), this has been a genuinely scholarly endeavour of mine, above and beyond just merely taking some public domain text, making no revisions to it whatsoever, and simply "making it look nice."

Let me add, by the way, that the sample pages you've shown us from your book look great, and I wish you every success with it, regardless of how you decide to distribute it.

Thank you, Harry, I really do like how this book has turned out -- it might very well be the best thing I've done so far, actually. It really makes me sad, though, that the attitude here seems to be that if I post my book here in the MR forums, if only to share (especially) with those people here who helped so much with the various books I've made over the years, that simply because I started with public domain texts (i.e. high-resolution scans of the original 16th/17th century pages -- not previously-digitized versions of them) that no matter what revisions I've made, sharing it here makes it a veritable free-for-all to grab and use for their own.

Because my copyright on my well-informed, knowledgeable revisions isn't worth a damn around here (even though, by law -- never mind common sense and fairness -- it actually is). :/

PS. To pdurrant...

Originally Posted by pdurrant

No number of corrections to the electronic text to make it reflect the original more closely will give the resulting text a new copyright.

Clearly you misunderstand what I've been doing here. I've been making corrections to the original, non-electronic 16th/17th century texts (which are full of errors). This has been, indeed, a "new" and "original" effort on my part, one that most publishers haven't done, they just transcribe those errors verbatim instead.