True History of Joshua Davidson, anyone?

Are there any Victorianists out there who would like to see an edition of Eliza Lynn Linton's The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist (1872)?  (Short version: suspiciously Christ-like guy appears in Victorian England! Guess what happens to him!) This was ELL's most successful novel by far, but aside from the facsimile "Novels of Faith and Doubt" edition, there's never been a scholarly reprint. 

Comments

[Karen Lofstrom]

If I have an ebook of Joshua Davidson (which I do) why on earth would I want to cumber my already-book-packed house with yet another book? (I haven't read the book yet; I find Ms. Linton rather irritating. I proofed too many of her essays at DP.) If I wanted a paper copy, for some odd reason, I could send the book through Lulu.

I don't think I need an annotated version either. I have given up on checking the notes for scholarly versions, as I am already KNOW 95% of what they're telling me.

Perhaps a student could use the annotations. Ebooks don't handle those very well at the moment (though I'm sure that readers and software will evolve). I doubt that there's a large enough student market at this point to support deadtree publication, but I could be wrong.

[Miriam]

Why are you assuming the book would only be available in hardcopy?

[Karen Lofstrom]

Because you used the words "edition" and "scholarly reprint". That doesn't sound like an ebook.

Doing an improved ebook might be a good idea, however. My copy turns out to be an old, old version from Blackmask and it comes out entirely underlined in Kindle (I think I used Calibre to convert from an older format, .pdb or .prc). I'll have to fix that. The version at archive.org is wretched: uncorrected OCR. The ebook cannot be found at Gutenberg or Manybooks, but is available for sale at several online stores. Dunno about the quality of those versions. I suspect dire, if it's uncorrected OCR. So the book could usefully be redone, perhaps by DP now that DP is older and ever so much more accurate.

If the book were done by an organization like adelaide.edu, which makes books available at no cost in well-done editions in good Kindle and ePub formats, that would be great. However, I would look with great disfavor upon a university that made it difficult to download the book (walled garden disease) or a university press that would charge for a e-version.

[Catherine Pope]

I'd be very interested to hear why you're not prepared to pay for a corrected and annotated e-version, Karen?

[Karen Lofstrom]

Because I'm poor. And because charging for bringing old books to life seems greedy, given that I've spent the last nine years turning old books into ebooks as a volunteer, for free.

It might be worth paying for an annotated version, if you're a student who needs one, but I don't. So I wouldn't want to pay for a feature that was useless to me.