publishing book-length manuscripts

[Jeffrey Anderson]

Hi there,

A friend of mine, Arthur Lerner, was one of the grandfathers of the
field of Poetry Therapy; he recently past away.  I inherited a copy of
his most recent Ph.D. dissertation.  I thought it was a sad thing that a
document which meant so much to Arthur was going to disappear onto a
single book shelf.

My solution was to scan the book, run OCR on the scan, and move the foot
notes to end notes with hypertext jumps.  The result is that the book
can be sent (i.e. published) instantly, costlessly anywhere on earth.
The marginal cost of setting this book up for Internet publishing was
just my time doing the scanning/translating tasks and error checking and
visual esthetics of presentation.  My goal: make it look exactly like
the published text.  The only exception was that I moved the footnotes
to be end notes because of the nature of HTML and the impossibility of
predicting where the page will end on each and every monitor.

The beauty of the output is that you can temporarily change font size
for ease of reading, easily extract subsets of info for purposes of note
taking etc., and easily translate the HTML format into other data
formats for other purposes such as the esthetics of printing a hard
copy.

If you would like to see a copy of Dr Lerner's dissertation you can
respond to this message.

I have described a process that works.  If someone has a dissertation
they need translated into HTML they can tell me what they think it would
be worth to them, and I could agree or not agree to do it for them.  At
any rate it would insure that a life's work gets into the informational
medium of the 21st century.  Remember, to place or make any document
available via the internet IS publishing, and the person(s) who do this
task are "publishers".

A side note, take a new look at Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding
Media". In the light of current unfolding of hypertext communication and
publishing via the Internet, he was truly an amazing savant.

Hope my words are a help.

Peace and light

Jeffrey Anderson