Washed my mom’s car yesterday.

Arrayed on the metal frame of the car­wash door: ’bout sev­en­teen mag­netic “We Sup­port Our Troops”, “Milan Soc­cer”, Jesus fish, Dar­win amphibia, “Bring Them Home” ribbons.

We swim in a sea of sym­bol­ism. For some peo­ple, avowed affil­i­a­tions can wash off. They col­lect along the shore.

Pick your own.

A brief exer­cise in mod­ern economics.

When the morning’s sym­po­sium began, I down­loaded the Project Guten­berg edi­tion of Anthony Hope’s adven­ture novel The Indis­cre­tion of the Duchess. This is a book I bought (that is, a phys­i­cal orig­i­nal copy I own) a few months ago, scanned on my Plus­tek scan­ner, sub­mit­ted to the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers web­site, and which Bar­bara and the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers team edited into HTML and text edi­tions, and there­after con­tributed to the Guten­berg archive.

[Why did I choose that book? Frankly because it’s a sim­ple novel, though an enter­tain­ing one, little-​​known. I could have cho­sen widely, and just from our own scanned library: we’ve pro­duced a few hun­dred books in the last cou­ple of years, and own thou­sands des­tined for online redis­tri­b­u­tion. One thing I’ve come to real­ize is that nov­els are much eas­ier to manip­u­late quickly. Dic­tio­nar­ies, text­books, and bib­li­ogra­phies are a bit trick­ier. If I’d cho­sen one of those more com­pli­cated vol­umes, I might’ve spent more than an hour on the fol­low­ing exercise.

Maybe two.]

You can view and down­load the cur­rent Project Guten­berg edi­tions of the book here.

When Paul Courant started speak­ing on the eco­nom­ics of con­tent, schol­ar­ship, pub­lish­ing and copy­right, I fired up Apple’s Pages soft­ware, and dropped the Guten­berg file directly into it.

Ugly! So I spent about 45 min­utes chang­ing the styles to suit my per­sonal tastes. The result­ing file is (approx­i­mately) an octavo book—like the orig­i­nal was—in a roughly con­tem­po­rary font I have on hand here on my lap­top. I used the scanned drop caps and illus­tra­tions and adjusted them some­what, and made mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the flow of the text, the pag­i­na­tion, the mar­gins, a bit of nip and tuck here and there.

I’ve never actu­ally used Apple’s Pages lay­out soft­ware much; I think I wrote a let­ter in it once. So I had a bit of trou­ble putting the page num­bers on the pages in the way I wanted. I sup­pose there must be a way; I could spend a few more min­utes doing so.

About the time Karl Pohrt (from Shaman Drum book­store) rec­om­mended Char­lie Stross’s Accelerando as the “best busi­ness book of recent times”, I saved the file as a PDF.

Here.

Why would I do such a thing? That is, in the big­ger pic­ture, what kind of insane eco­nom­ics would drive some idiot engi­neer to buy old, dead books nobody cares about, scan them and clut­ter up the Inter­nets with trashy nov­els, and then take a half-​​hour of valu­able time to make some PDF ver­sion nobody will ever read?

Bar­bara and I do this all the time, understand.

One answer (from Bar­bara, read­ing over my shoul­der): Because I can.

Good answer. A very, very good answer.

Another answer—the one I have in mind personally—is one that I know Karl and Char­lie Stross already under­stand. I won­der how many oth­ers in the audi­ence here will under­stand it. Before it trun­dles up to them one day and knocks them over. Tell me what you think it is.

Your hint: Char­lie Stross did write a busi­ness book.

For extra bonus irony: When Karl was talk­ing about Print on Demand/​Bind on Demand tech­nol­ogy, I acci­den­tally sent my edited Hope to the default printer, over in the IOE Build­ing on cam­pus, instead of to a PDF file. That’s the first case of Print By Acci­dent pub­li­ca­tion I can recall.…

So. Here’s my copy of Anthony Hope’s book. I could change it, if I find some­thing wrong with it. Let me know how you’d like it changed.

So could you. I could post it to a wiki some­where. You could, if you like. We could make a new edi­tion that looks dif­fer­ent. We could fix the typog­ra­phy. We could write your kids into it. We could trans­late it into Mandarin.

Why would we do that? Feel free to tell me. I’d really like to know. Arguably, we will do things along those lines. I did one or two just now.

But at this exact moment, they’re ring­ing the bell. I’m about to start the sec­ond ses­sion of this con­fer­ence, myself. Time for a sip of coffee.

later that after­noon: I spent ten (10) min­utes more, and added cor­rected head­ers, foot­ers, page num­bers, deleted the Project Guten­berg wrap­pers, enhanced the fron­tis illus­tra­tion to repli­cate its posi­tion in the orig­i­nal book, and added three words not found in the orig­i­nal book.

Ten min­utes.

And I deleted the old edi­tion, which the link used to point to. And sub­sti­tuted this one.