5 ms·

Like PG, our editions are blends of other editions, along with our own updates. Often our edition winds up looking nothing like the PG edition, for example when

by acabal 3y ago

Like PG, our editions are blends of other editions, along with our own updates. Often our edition winds up looking nothing like the PG edition, for example when we combine volumes, extract footnotes into endnotes, remove pagination, and so on. So submitting back to PG would be more like replacing a PG edition, instead of updating it; and I doubt the original PG submitter would like it if their hard work was simply replaced by someone else who thought their version was an improvement. Our volunteers do sometimes submit typos they find back to PG. We don't require that, so some producers do, and others don't.

chrismorgan 3y ago
Yeah, I was just looking through A Christmas Carol and observed a handful of editorial changes in the commits <https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christmas-carol/commits/master https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma...> (bran-new → brand-new, frouzy → frowzy, and “Lowercase some gratuitously uppercased words”). Frouzy → frowzy I’m mildly in favour of. Ditching bran-new definitely loses character (he omitted the d on purpose!). One or two of the lowercased words were mildly strange capitalised (e.g. Idol was inconsistent with the previous paragraph); but the lowercasing of many introduces broad stylistic inconsistency, and direct local inconsistency sometimes; and most of the capitalisations were not gratuitous. In fact, more than a few were clearly to be pronounced, as a form of emphasis (e.g. Poor, One, Us); and some were distinctly proper nouns in the context, the removal of which increases the parse difficulty (e.g. One¹, /(Cold )?(Roast|Boiled)/); and some reflect customs still common or even preferred in their domains (e.g. Act, Angelic, Apostles, Star). I just reckon that commit should be reverted, because from my perspective it’s mostly actively bad, and the rest subjective. I’m curious what your reaction is to my opinion here. But yes, I see that you’re practising some editorial oversight and not aiming to faithfully represent the original in all regards, which I gather is more generally Project Gutenberg’s goal; and this would obviously contraindicate upstreaming. On the other hand, when it comes to more stylistic matters, I tend to wish Project Gutenberg had more consistency. There’s too much gratuitous variation in presentation and ridiculous 256-colour backgrounds. It’s often too obvious much of it is the work of a group of individuals rather than a coherent effort. I’m curious about the footnote-to-endnote thing, because I’m not sure how the various formats in question handle them all, but in print endnotes are almost always just awful. If anything, I’d be expecting to replace endnotes with footnotes. (Me, I’m partial to sidenotes.) —⁂— ¹ Hickory dickory dock, three mice ran up the clock; the clock struck one, and has been charged with assault and battery.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Yeah, any edition of a book that's "updating" modern English loses me, including messing with capitalization. Not interested. I love the formatting on Standard Ebooks, but they're no use to me if they're "updating" language, aside from things like repairing typesetting and formatting lost or mangled in PG editions. Agree on notes in print, side notes (on very-wide editions) are best, then foot, then end of chapter endnotes. Full end-of-work endnotes are awful. Maybe they're better in ebooks, than footnotes, though? E-readers' poor UX for not-even-that-advanced features of books is part of why I barely use them, and practically never for any work that'd have notes of any sort.
  - jcurtis 3y ago
    Editorial commits are all marked as such and contain no non-editorial changes. The tools for compiling ebook files are available at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools https://github.com/standardebooks/tools, so creating your own versions with only the work you're interested in is straightforward (and can be at least partially automated).
  - bentley 3y ago
    As someone who regularly compares different scans of old books, I counter: for centuries it’s already been common practice for publishers to update spellings, recapitalize, and even make more drastic changes. You just never noticed because print books don’t have a public commit log. In the case of Standard Ebooks, “sound‐alike” changes are allowed (so spelling and capitalization changes are allowed when they make sense). Censorship, and even innocuous grammatical changes, are not. Despite generally appreciating old works in their own context, I find the tradeoff in readability for such a widespread practice to be worth it given how minor SE’s alterations are.
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      The problem is when irregular spelling is intended to capture a vernacular. It does a disservice to everyone, erasing the author's intent with homogenized language.

by acabal 3y ago

chrismorgan 3y ago

Yeah, I was just looking through A Christmas Carol and observed a handful of editorial changes in the commits <https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christmas-carol/commits/master https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma...> (bran-new → brand-new, frouzy → frowzy, and “Lowercase some gratuitously uppercased words”). Frouzy → frowzy I’m mildly in favour of. Ditching bran-new definitely loses character (he omitted the d on purpose!). One or two of the lowercased words were mildly strange capitalised (e.g. Idol was inconsistent with the previous paragraph); but the lowercasing of many introduces broad stylistic inconsistency, and direct local inconsistency sometimes; and most of the capitalisations were not gratuitous. In fact, more than a few were clearly to be pronounced, as a form of emphasis (e.g. Poor, One, Us); and some were distinctly proper nouns in the context, the removal of which increases the parse difficulty (e.g. One¹, /(Cold )?(Roast|Boiled)/); and some reflect customs still common or even preferred in their domains (e.g. Act, Angelic, Apostles, Star). I just reckon that commit should be reverted, because from my perspective it’s mostly actively bad, and the rest subjective. I’m curious what your reaction is to my opinion here. But yes, I see that you’re practising some editorial oversight and not aiming to faithfully represent the original in all regards, which I gather is more generally Project Gutenberg’s goal; and this would obviously contraindicate upstreaming. On the other hand, when it comes to more stylistic matters, I tend to wish Project Gutenberg had more consistency. There’s too much gratuitous variation in presentation and ridiculous 256-colour backgrounds. It’s often too obvious much of it is the work of a group of individuals rather than a coherent effort. I’m curious about the footnote-to-endnote thing, because I’m not sure how the various formats in question handle them all, but in print endnotes are almost always just awful. If anything, I’d be expecting to replace endnotes with footnotes. (Me, I’m partial to sidenotes.) —⁂— ¹ Hickory dickory dock, three mice ran up the clock; the clock struck one, and has been charged with assault and battery.

wharvle 3y ago
Yeah, any edition of a book that's "updating" modern English loses me, including messing with capitalization. Not interested. I love the formatting on Standard Ebooks, but they're no use to me if they're "updating" language, aside from things like repairing typesetting and formatting lost or mangled in PG editions. Agree on notes in print, side notes (on very-wide editions) are best, then foot, then end of chapter endnotes. Full end-of-work endnotes are awful. Maybe they're better in ebooks, than footnotes, though? E-readers' poor UX for not-even-that-advanced features of books is part of why I barely use them, and practically never for any work that'd have notes of any sort.
- jcurtis 3y ago
  Editorial commits are all marked as such and contain no non-editorial changes. The tools for compiling ebook files are available at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools https://github.com/standardebooks/tools, so creating your own versions with only the work you're interested in is straightforward (and can be at least partially automated).
- bentley 3y ago
  As someone who regularly compares different scans of old books, I counter: for centuries it’s already been common practice for publishers to update spellings, recapitalize, and even make more drastic changes. You just never noticed because print books don’t have a public commit log. In the case of Standard Ebooks, “sound‐alike” changes are allowed (so spelling and capitalization changes are allowed when they make sense). Censorship, and even innocuous grammatical changes, are not. Despite generally appreciating old works in their own context, I find the tradeoff in readability for such a widespread practice to be worth it given how minor SE’s alterations are.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    The problem is when irregular spelling is intended to capture a vernacular. It does a disservice to everyone, erasing the author's intent with homogenized language.