Ebooking update

[regshoe]

I haven't been writing very much lately, but I thought if I'm not going to write I may as well use the time for another fandom-adjacent activity, and so I've returned to ebook making and have been working on The Life and Adventures of Christian Davies.

It really is a fascinating book. I've tried to find out a little more about Christian Davies, and haven't found much; the broad outline of her life is attested, but this book appears to be the main source for most of the writing about her and its authenticity and accuracy are rather doubtful. Her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography makes interesting reading: it calls the attribution of the anonymously-published book to Daniel Defoe 'mistaken' and notes the difficulty of historical interpretation; the record of her admission to Chelsea Hospital apparently gives her name as Catherine, not Christian. I'm sure a thorough investigation of available historical sources could turn up more, but if anyone has done one I haven't found it yet.

And working on the book is interesting in light of that. Is it authentic at all, or a total fake? (Its publication the year after Christian's death does look a bit suspicious; OTOH, Hannah Snell's autobiography was written in the same way and is AFAIK well-attested as authentic, so it's not implausible.) Are the historical parts describing the war an interpolation by the writer, while the biographical parts are really by Christian? Is it authentic, but Christian herself was heavily embellishing and/or making stuff up?

It's a fun and fascinating read, anyway, even if parts of it sometimes feel a little bit like being stuck sat next to Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby at a dinner party. I've just got to the part where Christian, having found her husband again only to learn that he's been cheating on her with a random Dutch woman, refuses to return to him and then goes off and starts flirting with a different random Dutch woman whom she meets while travelling. I do think the biographical parts ring true as a portrayal of a believable character, even if it's not actually an accurate narration of events, and I do like her very much.

The eighteenth-century style and formatting are proving a bit of a challenge to the automatic text-recognition, so I've got a lot of correcting to do and am going slowly. Long ſ is a frequent problem, though not always: sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it turns it into f or l or /, sometimes the unexpected weird-looking S causes a misinterpretation of the whole word (ſo becomes to, ſelf becomes felt, ſuch, amusingly, is often rendered as fuck). The book puts proper nouns in italics, which was standard at the time, and also uses italics for dialogue, which I've not seen elsewhere, and the resulting long mostly-italicised passages are another challenge for the text recognition.

Incidentally, I'm disappointed to see that Gutenberg have recently started adding AI-generated summaries to ebook pages (which are, from a brief skim of some of them, not always accurate and also rather disconcertingly point-missing in the way of AI-generated text). I think when I submit this one I'll write my own summary and see if I can request that they use that one instead, then if they say yes I might ask to replace the ones on the existing books I did.

Comments

[philomytha]

Good job on the ebook! And yes, I saw some of those AI summaries on Gutenberg - one on a kidlit book about WW1 pilots that started mentioning Nazis and the Luftwaffe stood out as particularly daft. Supplying your own summary is the way to go.

[regshoe]

Oh dear... Yeah, I hope the own-summary strategy works. Thank you!

[greenwoodside]

Creating e-books free for everyone to use is a marvellous and generous thing to do.

And bloody AI is absolutely everywhere now. I admit to sometimes finding it useful, but I wish it would stay in a box away from non-generative AI. At the moment browsing the web can feel like walking through a plague of very chatty locusts.

[regshoe]

Thank you! It's good fun—I enjoy getting into the details of book formatting, as well as spending more time with interesting books.

I try to avoid generative AI as much as possible. A box would certainly be useful!

[phantomtomato]

I also encountered those AI summaries recently—one book I’ve read is described as a school novel, despite leaving the school setting very early and transitioning to city life. It’s a shame; I would love reasonable summaries when trawling PG for new books to read, but they have to be accurate to be any use! It seems like summaries would be a small thing to ask of creators of new ebooks, and like something that could be turned into a community volunteer project for the existing books without summaries.

[regshoe]

Reasonable summaries would be useful!—I like taking pot luck on Gutenberg with a book I know hardly anything about sometimes, but other times you do want a bit of context—and that is true that it wouldn't be much extra for the transcribers to do. Well, hopefully they'll let me do some.

[luzula]

Oh cool! When you first read and reviewed this, I was interested in reading it, but could not find an ebook version, so I never read it. So go you for improving access to it!

[regshoe]

Thank you :) And I do recommend it (or at least I can recommend reading the parts actually about Christian and skimming the interminable siege warfare, heh).