The Content, the Container, and the Bertrand Russell Exception

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            Most of us would agree that piracy is wrong, and I’m not here to dispute such a notion. That being said, I’m not above snagging a free copy of a book when the author is dead and has no more need of royalty cheques. I’m complicated that way.

            I applied this rule when seeking out a digital copy of Bertrand Russell’s famous brick of knowledge A History of Western Philosophy. Thankfully, the wonderful people at the Internet Archive were able to provide a Print on Demand (POD) version of Russell’s work even though it hasn’t become part of the Public Domain just yet. I downloaded an EPUB for my Kobo and assumed that there wouldn’t be any problems unless I simply didn’t like it.

            Well, that was my first mistake. I was about five pages into Russell’s throat clearing when I saw that something was amiss. While discussing the importance of philosophy in relation to the Ancient Greeks, certain flaws in the text became apparent. There were plenty of sentences which ended mid-thought without a period, only to be continued in the beginning of the following paragraph, as if the transcriber decided to press the enter button at an unfortunate time.

            It was through discovering these editing errors throughout the text that I obtained a more precise understanding of the relation between the “content” and “container” that Whitney Trettien was discussing in their article, “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality.” Mainly, the difficulty that she was discussing was that the carrier of the content does not always project what it is supposed to. One of the dream notions from scholars who have been championing digital literature was that these digital copies would be a mirror-copy of the print-book which they can physically hold feel the pages turn. The text[uality] is never supposed to be obscured through its transition from a print artefact to a digital one like examples Trettien’s research had uncovered.

            As scholars, and even as rabidly curious readers, we need to be increasingly aware of when the object’s content does not match its title. Far more than a mere editing error or experiment with usability, when the text is altered in such a way during the digital transition  the authenticity is evaporated and can no longer be communicated as intended. The smudge in the painting ruins the entire canvas.

            Clearly, I’m much more sceptical of the digitizing process than I was before downloading the eBook or coming across Trettien’s article, but I’m not abandoning my digital tools. These issues remain real and command my attention regarding what I consume, but my experience dictates that they are the exception, not the rule. Even with the much older texts which I have uncovered from Project Gutenberg and the Oxford Text Archive have never showed such an error.

            The problem exists, to be sure, but it is not enough to dissuade me from eReading. I wouldn’t have even uncovered this failure of preservation were it not for my preference of digital materials. 

Best,

Jackson Ossea