Book People Archive

Re: The American Language

jon ingram said:
>    They're wrong, but rather than 
>    get into a potential argument with them, 
>    it's better to avoid the conflict altogether and 
>    generate an edition from an alternate source.

so you let yourself get bullied, eh?

well bully for you.

but that path is not for me.

i might decide to refrain from scraping their text,
but if i did, it would be because i made a decision
that -- as commercial creators of the e-text, they
had _earned_ the right to profit from their work --
but that would be a favor that i granted to them,
not something i would let them obtain by force...

as a member of the public, who owns the public domain,
that text belongs to me.   that's where any discussion starts.

and if i choose to make it the case, that's where it ends too.

to do anything less is to make a mockery of the public domain.

but less we end up choking on philosophical matters here,
on a practical note, it would still be wise to scrape the text,
for use (at whatever point in the process you deem it "safe")
in correcting the results of your own digitization.

so let's cut to the chase, jon, ok?   can you scrape that text?

i can, because i programmed my own tool to do the job.
what tool would you use?   let's compare our results, ok?

-bowerbird