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The Longest Now


Lack of versioning, texts on CD
Monday November 22nd 2004, 3:42 pm
Filed under: popular demand

This business of Manila not storing the history of posts is a real shame… a template bug just blanked a pair of posts.   And my local text editor doesn’t store temporary revisions, so I lost a segment of writing last night in a crash.  What is it about tracking revisions of text — an amazingl cheap operation these days – that is so difficult? 


What I wanted to say about texts on CD is that the German Wikipedia CDshorter, cleaner, and well-cut — has seen 100k downloads on top of its physical distribution to 30k people, and the CD image has had many times as many downloads.  Lovely.  And, contrary to popular belief, it works on both Windows and Macs.


The company (Directmedia) that helped bring this about also publishes titles like “The Great German Classics” on CD.  A good decade into the Gutenberg Project, why are these publishing houses so unknown?  Why can’t I rattle off the name of a major publisher of Classic Literature CDs in English, the way I can say “Addison-Wesley, Penguin, O’Reilly, Dover, Springer-Verlag“? 

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