On the contrary: This would be a perfect use for hypertext. It would represent an obvious technological advance.
What you might be suggesting is that previous drafts will have disappeared? But as of now that represents a social choice. The technology for saving drafts is here; when implemented, it is trivial and operates totally in the background. One can even say it can be complete to the point of intrusiveness. Has there ever been a better and more complete record of editing changes than what’s available to anybody at Wikipedia?
But it’s not drafts that are usually the focus of these, but editions, and building a variorum edition from variant electronic published versions should be a great technical simplification.
And aren’t “director’s cut” CD releases a kind of variorum edition for film? The popular market for these probably exceeds the level of support for variorum editions throughout the history of print, even throwing in Bibles.
If variorum editions disappear it will because critical analysis of a work as it develops historically will be considered completely unimportant, not worth even the slightest effort. I say “completely,” because it’s not as if these editions are that big a deal now.
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 6:03 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
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> On Aug 3, 2010, at 8:32 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
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>> Lots of great writers could never get thoughts flowing properly on a wordprocessor.
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> Doomed in the future: variorum editions.
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