… is an eensy-weensy crosscheck so hard?
The complete works of one of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online. The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications – all of it searchable.Other texts appearing online for the first time include the first editions of the Journal Of Researches (1839), The Descent Of Man (1871), The Zoology Of The Voyage Of HMS Beagle (1838-43) and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin Of Species, the pivotal tome that elucidated his thoughts on evolution.
Wrong! While eBooks may be snazzy new technology to some bromidian Cambridge professors, Project Gutenberg has been producing them since 1976. Plain vanilla, ASCII searchable texts, too! Guess Cambridge and BBC should have checked PG’s stash first. A cursory search indicates that this is not the “first time” some of these texts have gone online.
Still, the pictures and downloadable MP3s should be a lot of fun.
Related:
The Complete Works Of Charles Darwin Online (Cambridge University)
Charles Darwin eBooks In English And French (Project Gutenberg)
Hey Maitri!
Not to be nitpicky, but I think the article is saying that these particular editions have never been available online. For instance, they’re publishing the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of Origin of Species, whereas the OoS on Project Gutenberg is the 11th edition.
And edition makes a difference in the eBook format because … ?
Well, there’s differences from one edition to the next (mainly of importance to scholars.) Academic texts would be more prone to revision than, say, fictional works.
In this case, OoS went through 6 revisions during Darwin’s lifetime “with cumulative changes and revisions to deal with counter-arguments raised” (from Wikipedia.) So having online access to editions 1-6 (six being the definitive edition, apparently) would be nice, and wasn’t possible prior to the work at Cambridge.
I know the difference between editions; it was my stab at facetious humor which failed as usual. My friends use bold, green text to indicate sarcasm – perhaps I should follow suit. Project Gutenberg worked very hard to get whatever editions they have, and they should’ve been cited as having done previous work on ePublishing Darwin’s treatises.
Oh, ok. Yeah, that went right over my head! Nothing against Project Gutenberg here, it just seemed like the article was technically correct – perhaps it could have been a bit broader in scope.
And that’s enough pedantry for now :)