Three Digital Publications: Carrying the Printer Home Wybo Wiersma King’s College London mail@wybowiersma.net Abstract In this paper we compared three widely differing digital editions of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations: those offered by the Gutenberg Project, the Library of Liberty, and Google Books. While there are notable variations be- tween these resources in terms of their suitability for various ways of reading, we found their usefulness for serious research to be rather limited, mostly for lack of transformative possibilities (such as adding notes to them). Thus instead of replacing the printed ver- sion, digital editions are mostly to be seen as an additional format, espe- cially suitable as input to other pro- grams and processes such as searching or home printing. 1 Introduction In this paper we will look at three on-line versions of Adam Smiths An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. They will be examined for their readability and their usefulness for research. First we will explain the limitations of this paper and the study it is based on, then we will justify our choice of resources and editions, followed by a short sketch of the different modes and types of reading that we judged them for. When the approach is thus clarified, we will describe the three resources in more detail, and give a rea- soned critique of them. Finally we say some- thing about possible improvements, and likely current uses of the resources. 1.1 Constraints and Limits In this paper we limit ourselves to on-line ver- sions, and will not be looking at other soft- ware for reading electronic versions of books. We will only use the standard, unextended (no plugins), Javascript enabled browser (Firefox 3.5.x) using it’s default settings (default fonts & font-sizes). In a sense this could be seen as an artificial limitation — and maybe even begging the question —, as nowadays there is both specialized software for reading (various .pdf readers), and some specialized software for research available (such as John Bradley’s Pliny, the XLibris annotation tool, the PKP Reading Tools, and others). 1 However first of all we had to limit the scope of this paper for practical reasons. Sec- ondly we wanted to stay as close as possible to the experience of the regular reader and re- searcher (plugins and specialized software are still hardly used). Naturally, while very rele- vant and important, the reading-experience on dedicated hardware-devices such as the Kin- dle, or Netbooks (for reading on the bed) are also not taken into consideration. 1 John Bradley. Pliny. 2009. URL: http://pliny.cch. kcl.ac.uk/; John Bradley. “Thinking about interpreta- tion: Pliny and scholarship in the humanities”. In: Lit Linguist Computing (Sept. 2008), fqn021. DOI: 10 . 1093 / llc / fqn021. URL: http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/ cgi / content / abstract / fqn021v1; J. K Kim, R. Farzan, and P. Brusilovsky. “Social navigation and annota- tion for electronic books”. In: ACM (2008); James MacGre- gor and Michael Joyce. “Revolutionary Reading, Evolution- ary Toolmaking: (Re)development of Scholarly Reading and Annotation Tools in Response to an Ever-changing Scholarly Climate”. In: (2009).