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From: [log in to unmask] (James J. O'Donnell)

Augustine's Confessions: Print scholarship takes to the WWW

I am pleased to announce release of the Internet edition of a substantial
work of scholarship, coinciding with availability of a paper reprint
edition.  These steps demonstrate that it is no longer necessary for
scholarly works to be "out of print" and unavailable, and also show that
high-quality scholarship of the sort until now available only in
expensive, limited press-run editions, can be made widely and freely
available to students and scholars.

In 1992, I published with Oxford's Clarendon Press imprint the three
volumes (approx. 1200 pages) of Augustine:  Confessions (introduction,
text, and commentary by James J. O'Donnell:  ISBN 0-19-814378-8).  The
work sold for c. $300 and eventually went out of print after selling
approximately 1200 copies.

The entire work is now available on the Internet free of charge to users:
http://www.stoa.org/hippo.  No special equipment or software is required
and the work can be read with all commonly used browsers.  A duplicate
copy is available at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/conf.  The work
provides a complete Latin text of the Confessions, a detailed scholarly
commentary on the text line-by-line, and a lengthy interpretive
introduction (http://www.stoa.org/hippo/comm.html) - the most accessible
part of the book to the Latinless reader.

At approximately the same time, a reprint edition of the hardcover
original is being published by Sandpiper Books, in association with Oxford
University Press.  The American distributor is Powells Bookstore, 1501 E.
57th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637 (tel:  773-666-5880; fax:
773-955-2967; e-mail:  [log in to unmask]), with books due for
delivery in early February 2000 (price TBD, but substantially lower than
the original hardcover).  British distribution is done through Postscript,
24 Langroyd Road, London SW17 7PL (0208-767-7421).

The WWW edition has been prepared in cooperation with the Stoa Consortium
(www.stoa.org), under the leadership of Ross Scaife of the University of
Kentucky with SGML encoding and HTML conversion by Anne Mahoney of Boston
University.  I am deeply grateful to these colleagues for their interest
in the project and the quality of the result.  The Stoa project seeks to
make available and preserve for the future high-quality peer-reviewed
scholarly work available on the Internet.  Financial support for the
conversion of this work was provided by the University of Pennsylvania,
for which I am very grateful as well.

E-versions and p-versions of the "same book" are not identical and I
expect there will continue to be users of both versions of this text -
indeed many individuals will find both useful.  The two versions are close
enough, however, that it makes sense to represent them under the same
library cataloging record.  I am happy to report that they can be seen
this way in the Online Public Access Catalogs of two great universities
with which I have had the honor of association, Penn
(http://www.franklin.library.yale.edu) and Yale
(http://webpac.library.yale.edu/webpac/orbis.htm).  (My thanks to my
colleagues Patricia Renfro of Penn and Ann Okerson of Yale for
facilitating this demonstration.)



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