HOME March 9, 2016 


Making an eBook: a Case Study
By Richard Weyhrauch

This note describes my journey to produce a modern edition of 'The Essays of Francis Bacon'. I chose this publication because it brings up typical considerations (for me) when creating an electronic publication of some work and it illustrates the kind of work that goes into such a production. Here I wear two hats: one as the maintainer of the IBUKI DataBase, which holds the texts; and two as the general editor of 'Speculum Mundi Press' who has the final responsible for the selection and the final say about the content of any eBook it published. This dual role is reflected in the tasks outlined below.

My interest in making an eBbook containing the essays of Francis Bacon started when browsing the Internet Archive, I noticed an edition of Bacon's Essays edited by Edwin A. Abbott. Abbot has been well known to me since I read Flatlands in High School and as I got older reaized that he was a very interesting man. He was a minister and many of his writings were about religeous issues (about which he had contriversial opinions). What surprised me was that he had published an edition of the essays of Francis Bacon.

An important component of nineteenth century editions of important writing is that they frequently record information, usually in notes, about the works that have largely been forgotten in the twenty-first century. It is no longer thought useful for people to read the Greek and Latin classics in their original language no less have enough of a knowledge of their content to notice illusions to this literature in the essays. In fact this phenomina is not restricted to the ancient classics but extends even to such 'well known' writers as Shakespeare. Extracting this information out of these 'old' works is both time consuming and hard, but it is both interesting and important to preserve. One of the goals of this note is to give an example of this process and to show how I propose this information should be organized to make it available (forever more) in digital form and show how it can be used to make texts more understandable and interesting.

Choosing a copy-text

After deciding the general theme of a new publication—in our case the essays of Francis Bacon—the hunt starts by looking at previous editions. One first task is to choose the copy-text for the essays. A 'copy-text' is an original or earlier edition of a work that is used to create a new edition. In our case the question is: What edition of Bacon's essays to use for our copy-text? The issue here is complicated because: 1) the original official publications of the essays was in Latin; 2) Bacon himself published several editions of the essays both 'improving' them and adding new ones; and 3) if our edition is to include the text of the essays in English which translation(s) should we pick as the copy-text of our English version?

This brings up the issue of translations in general. The IBUKI policy here has developed over a long time but is now quite clear. Translations are [work]s in their own right, which translate [edition]s of some [work] into a new language. The translator may also make more or less use of previous translations and commentaty. This results in the generation of new [work]s and [edition]s. The new translation is both a [work] (with its own [edition]s) of the translator and a new edition of the [work] being translated. In addition, new mini [work]s of the translator are created for the [edition]s of the translations. These include things like the prefaces and introductions of the [edition]s of the translations as well as any notes that accompany the translation. (These remarks actually apply to 'new' scholarly [edition]s even of the original untranslated [work](s). The need to nameing the [work]s and [edition]s and their storage ismy responsibility wearing my hat as the maintainer of the IBUKI DataBase, where the texts are stored.

Example

The bad news is that there are fifty three essays of Francis Bacon| and (to make compuitation on the database feasible) we consider each one (as well as the entire collection or sometimes a subcollection) a seperate [work]. We will not list here all the works but just a sample.




WORKS

|bacon-essays|        ; all the essays
  |bacon-truth|       ; each of the essays
    ...

|abbott-bacons|                  ; abbot's [work] as editor
  |abbott-bacon-preface|         ; pieces of abbott's [work]
  |abbott-bacon-chronology|
  |abbott-bacon-himself|
  |abbott-bacon-philosopher|
  |abbott-bacon-theologian|
  |abbott-bacon-politician|
  |abbott-bacon-moralist|
  |abbott-bacon-dedication|

the essays
  |abbott-bacon-truth|           ; abbott's version of each essay
    ...
NIL