Posted by Edwin M. Kiser on May 21, 1999 at 20:33:21 from proxy1.sho.prodigy.net:
In Reply to: Electronic texts of AR's books posted by Patrick Fox on May 21, 1999 at 16:26:01:
My own machine readable copies are what I consider to be "fair
use" copies, in that I made the copies FOR MYSELF, NOT for any
DISTRIBUTION. They have gone nowhere.
You may find this perhaps a bit extraordinary, but these copies I
have are NOT SCANNED, but TYPED. Yes, I TYPED them in myself.
You see, I have found that in my occasional re-readings of these
books, since I first met them some fifty years ago (or longer, egad...)
that such re-readings were apt to be just browsings, not readings,
as frankly, I do know the story, and know how it comes out.
I chose to TYPE them in simply because I knew it would force me to
pay ATTENTION to exactly what was said, and the STYLE in which it
was said. For example, I have made previous references to the
frequenty of sentences that began with "Then,..." and "Well,..."
A simple re-reading would have skipped over these. I wanted this
pass thru these stories to be a bit more in depth, and thus,
this time, receive in even greater measure the reward for enjoying
AR. It is a labor of love; it is not work. I have typed in only
the first two, SA and SD, but have started on WH.
Not sure just where these files are to go, now that I have typed them
in. I do see how it is interesting to make some machine readable
searches to dicover certain oddities, as my recent contribution
has definitely shown. The good old DOS FIND command pulled out those
FARTHER/FURTHER references, and put the line numbers on it. Nothing
more sophisticated than that.
It is my belief that as long as these copies are not distributed,
then there is nothing in terms of copyright violations involved, as
they serve only to be an analysis tool for further research, and,
as I said before, really to be just a labor of love.
Ah, the strange things people do for fun - or love.
Interesting note here: after typing in a chapter, I do a spell
checker run on it to try to catch some typos. My checker is
AMERICAN, and the British spellings attract all sorts of attempts
to correct the spellings, which I just have to IGNORE these attempts.
The net result of this probably I will start to write other non-
related items with perhaps a bit more of a British flavor in the
spelling. Why can't we speak the same language...
Ed Kiser