I have no idea where I’m going with tonight’s post. I just have some thoughts provoked by my paperback book project. As I’ve told you before, all my self-published Erling Skjalgsson books (except for The Baldur Game, still waiting in the wings) are now available as paperbacks, thanks to backbreaking effort on my own part.

Currently I’m working on West Oversea. Its previous publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has transferred all rights to me, and I’m currently going through the manuscript, formatting it as an e-book form. Nordskog was kind enough to provide me with the graphic files for all their neat art, and I’m embedding that stuff now. My version won’t look exactly like Nordskog’s, but it will have similarities.

Which gets me thinking about some of the stuff I sort of learned in library school… some of which I sort of remember. I’ll probably get the terms wrong.

First of all, we studied what a work is. I reviewed True Grit last night. True Grit, as conceived and written by Charles Portis, is a work. Print it in hardback, print it in paperback, make it an e-book – it’s still the same work. If you adapt it as a movie, that’s a different work, because substantial changes have been made. A comic book version is also a different work (if I remember correctly).

But the hardback, the paperback, and the ebook, though the same work, are all different editions. And when it went out of print, and then got printed again, that became a new edition.

The individual copy you hold in your hand, on the other hand, pretty much identical to all the other copies of the edition, but distinct in its individual quiddity and whatever notes you might have scribbled in the margins, that’s called an instantiation.

My new e-book of West Oversea, similar to but different in detail from Nordskog’s, will be a new edition.

This is all complicated by the question of editorial changes. As I’ve been working through the manuscript, I’ve made small corrections. Mostly in punctuation. Very rarely, I’ll change a minor word. I don’t want to go crazy – I feel I must let the chips lay where they fell, even if I could do a better polishing job now than I did back in 2009. Mostly for the sake of the people who already bought it and think they’ve read the work.

I think that makes my new edition a different iteration of the work.

But it’s the same work.

Unless I remember it wrong.