eBooks @ Adelaide

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner / Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A new online edition of this classic poem, beautifully illustrated by Gustave Doré.

Someone asked me a little while ago if I had a copy of The Pirate, by Sir Walter Scott. As it happens, I do not. It’s the one title in the Waverley series of novels that my collection lacks. I did a quick search at the time, and could not find it in the usual places. Google Books had it, but only Volume 1. It struck me at the time as somewhat cruel to digitise only Volume 1 of a novel. Where is volume 2? Is there a 3rd volume? (Typical of Victorian and earlier publishing). I guess they’ll get around to it, some time. But it would be nice to know when. And it would be better, I think, to not release Volume 1 until all volumes were ready.

Google Books lists several copies, presumably different editions. But they are all “limited preview” or “snippet view”. Even though this is a public domain work. Well, Google have the right to control distribution of the results of their scanning efforts. I won’t argue with that.

I also checked the Internet Archive, archive.org, to see what they had. A search for “walter scott pirate” turns up 50 items! Great! No. Chaos. First, there’s no indication on the search results of which edition has been scanned. You’d have to go look at each item to find that out, and for detailed edition information you’d have to download the PDF, which is typically tens of megabytes. Grr. Furthermore, among these 50 items are listed some (not all) of 23 volumes illustrated by George Cruikshank. Now, The Pirate may be a lengthy novel, but I hardly think it was published as 23 volumes! I think what this actually is, is a complete Waverley Novels edition including The Pirate. Great, but which of those 23 volumes is actually The Pirate?

Archive.org really needs some serious work on their metadata, or it’s value will be eroded by chaos and an inability to find anything.

Last week I had some correspondence with the delightful Solange, who was able to give me some valuable feedback on our edition of Anna Karenina. As an aside, she mentioned that our collection lacked anything by Pushkin, a disgrace which I have remedied immediately.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers.

We now have an edition of Eugene Onegin, two translations of The Capatain’s Daughter, and a couple of short stories, and I will add more as I find them.