Preserve or Improve?

[jeff_duntemann]

Carl & Jerry fans have been beating my door down wanting to know where Volume 4 is, and so I've been spending all spare cycles on getting the book done in time for release by Halloween. I have all the story text scanned in and OCRed, and now I'm doing the edit pass on the text, fixing OCR

Comments

comparing notes

[anonymous]

I have reworked the Tom Swift stories (not Jr.), after downloading them from gutenberg.org. Many of them give clear evidence of having been OCRed, and I fixed those errors. I did not change the language, and ignored that InDesign was unhappy with a speech of the form

[vila_resthal]

Jeff,

Do two versions, one with the original text intact the way it was published, and one with the grammer and editing fixed for modern readers. Give readers a choice as to which version that they want. That way the original version is preserved for "strict constructionist" fans as well as having a modernized version that allows youe inner editor to rest easy.

More work for you, of course, but more satisfying to all concerned as well.

Dan

purpose of the book

[happy_hacker]

I think the question here really is whether the work is important as an artifact of its time, or as content

"Tom Swift Lives!"

[anonymous]

Thanks for the complimentary mention of my website, Jeff. I'm not sure whether I ought to call the TSL stories "rewrites"--though I've kept the titles and a few plot elements, I discovered right away that I wasn't interested in doing a modest update or "fix": my tribute to my boyhood hero consists in writing essentially new stories with as much of the original style as is still fun today. It's resurrection in a new body.

Scott
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