According to the copyright in the United States, works first published before 1923 in the United States are in the public domain1, which means these books do not come within the purview of copyright regulations and belong to everyone equally. The development and widespread use of the internet and information technology offer an easy alternative to republish works, the copyrights of which were lifted and many such books have reappeared in electronic form in several online publications and other domains.
Most importantly, the electronic publication makes the texts accessible to everyone freely and available twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. So far, there are more than twenty-eight thousand full texts of works archived in Project Gutenberg, one of the leaders in the digital library. They offer these texts free of cost to the public. However, inadequate information about the edition used as well as the omission of original prefaces leads researchers to question the reliability of those texts.
This essay will focus on the text of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a novel published in 1838. By comparing the version of the text provided in two main digital libraries, Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive with the version of Penguin Classics collection, I will try to find out the implication of these electronic texts on the printed book, for research purposes.
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket contains three basic American texts which have initially appeared as several serialized installments in the Southern Literary Messenger during January and February 1837. These installments became the early chapters of the novel a year later when the first book form of the full text was published by Harper & Brothers, which is the only complete version that Poe authorized.2 The third version is the one printed in Volume IV in Poe’s The Works which is issued by Redfield and edited by Rufus W. Griswold. The edition used by Penguin Classics is that of The Imaginary Voyages, edited by Burton R. Pollin, who has made minor alterations to the first edition.
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is freely accessible to the public as its copyright has been expired and, therefore, it is now archived in most digital libraries, such as Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. However, there may not be any reliable information regarding which edition of the text is provided. The version offered in Project Gutenberg of Poe’s The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition, which seems to be never published as printed in book form3.
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition has been divided into five volumes and Pym is included in the third volume. Nowhere in the material will one find information indicating the name of the publisher, the identity of the general editor, or even the year of publication. Only the title of the work, date of release and updating, and the producer are provided. Though some people argue that electronic publication enjoys the advantage that the work can be revised or modified as soon as an error comes to notice, it seems that explanatory notes are not ever provided to indicate when and where the text has been changed.
Besides, the preface to The Works is not available except in the case of two essays on Edgar Allan Poe by his contemporary writers James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, which are enclosed as an introduction. Both essays are far from enough to help readers with an appreciation of each piece of the works of Poe. Additionally, Project Gutenberg only offers the names of authors in these two essays while information about their first appearances cannot be traced. Therefore, one should be cautious when choosing the texts that are archived on such websites. In the case of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym also there is no publication information.
In addition to inadequate publication information, another important element of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is also missing in the electronic format. In the print version, some hand-drawn figures of the chasm are available, which reinforce and authenticate the adventures of Pym. However, in Project Gutenberg’s edition, those figures have been omitted. This might be due to the text coding methods that Project Gutenberg has adopted.
Therefore, one might get confused and frustrated when reading Chapter 23 of Pym, which contains explanations about those figures in detail which constitutes more than half of the entire narration. Without the illustrated figures alongside the narrative, the text is incomplete and becomes difficult to be understood. Another problem with the text of Pym in Project Gutenberg is that the unknown editor divided it into twenty-five chapters without providing any notes on chapter labeling. The first American edition of the text includes two different chapters labeled “XXIII”. To set right this anomaly, Burton R. Pollin found a solution by distinguishing the two chapters as “23” and “23 bis”.
Therefore, generally speaking, there is no chapter 25 in that print version of Pym. Any reference to Chapter 25 from Pym can confuse. Finally, those explanatory notes at the end of the text in the electronic version are inadequate and insufficient. There are only seven notes in total for a novel that has more than seventy thousand words. In comparison, the printed edition of Penguin Classics of Pym contains as many as 22 pages dedicated to explaining the text. Therefore, attention must be paid to ascertain which edition of the text is available in the digital library, especially if it is for academic reference.
In contrast to the text of Pym used in Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive (IA) seems to have done a better job. The text of Poe’s Pym offered by IA is the first edition published by Harper & Brothers in 1838, which is valuable for research. Instead of providing plain text only, the site also provides the scanned copy of the book located in Universities of California Libraries. Every page of the book has been scanned and the details of publication information are correctly displayed. All the contents are searchable for convenience even in PDF format. The physical format of the book is subject to degradation from repeated use as well as restrictions of location and availability. However, this archived edition of the text enables alternative access to the copy and obviates these constraints.
Even though more and more printed books are being republished on the internet, the questionable quality of internet publishing leads to criticism relating to authority and reliability. Unlike a traditional publisher or a university press, internet publishing does not require the intervention of any institution. Therefore, it lacks scholarly value or credibility. Without peer review or an appropriate editorial process, publications over the internet lack authority for academic researchers. At the same time, the belief that the scholar or student prefers the physical format of the printed book helps in preserving that format. Therefore proper care and alteration need to be paid while citing from internet documents.
Although it has been suggested that digital texts can help with works for the perseveration of the physical collection, this is not wholly true. The digital archive is also potentially vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters besides the possibility of virus attacks and hacking. Long-storage or location can not be easily maintained and it also involves cost factors. Also, the sources are not considered reliable as to guarantee the future readers to make references from the internet.
Bibliography
Primary
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Project Gutenberg. 2008. Web.
University of California Berkeley: Gift of Thomas Rex Hardy. Internet Archive. 2009. Web.
—, introd. Richard Kopley, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. US: Penguin, 1999.
Secondary
C J Armstrong, THE PUBLISHING OF ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY MONOGRAPHS AND TEXTBOOKS. 1998. Web.
Peter B. Hirtle. 2009 Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. Web.
Footnotes
- Peter B. Hirtle. 2009 Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States.
- Richard Kopley, A Note on the Text, The No matched results of the edition have been found in major search engines and internet bookshops.