Of movable type

I love digital books because of factors like searchability and portability, and, increasingly, cost.¹

Like many people, though, I still love printed matter for many reasons: the sensory qualities of ink and paper; the physical gestures of opening, paging, fanning, marking, dog-earing, and closing; the aesthetic delights of a well-designed page; and, yes, the nerdy pleasure of knowing that today's book is a legacy of the ancient codex. I have given and received many special books over the years, and can attest that the appeal of a great book is often enhanced by the materials from which it is constructed.

That said, there is one critical area in which digital books, particularly those representing conversions of older printed sources, frequently fail: accuracy. And when accuracy matters, as it does especially for reference works like grammars and dictionaries, extra caution must be exercised, including checking references in digital versions against "canonical" print sources (themselves of course not free of errors).²

So each medium will undoubtedly have its place for the foreseeable future, with digital books eventually becoming ubiquitous. With respect to traditional publishing, then, I've enjoyed working on some very interesting and challenging projects:

Since the late 1990s, I have contributed custom fonts (using Fontographer) to the Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project, which has been publishing critical editions of the scrolls since 1994. If you ever meet a "Nabatean qoph," chances are good that I created the electronic version of it!

From 2002–2005, I coordinated the final stages of research, writing, and editing of

Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) [publisher | LOC | WorldCat].

In 2004, I typeset and indexed Patrick D. Miller's

The Way of the Lord: Essays in Old Testament Theology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). [publisher | LOC | WorldCat] (Reprinted, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). [publisher | LOC | WorldCat]

From 2007–2008, I typeset and assisted in the indexing of the erudite mensch Bernard M. Levinson's

"The Right Chorale": Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008) [publisher | LOC | WorldCat].

I also electronically marked up the index of Levinson's

Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2008) [publisher | LOC | WorldCat].

Indexing is HARD work, and Microsoft Word doesn't help much with the mechanics.

My most recent project, primarily using Adobe InDesign CS3 Middle Eastern, was typesetting and assisting in the design of Mahdi Alosh and Allen Clark's

Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). [publisher]

As proud as I am of the creative, technical labor that went into producing these twenty-first century books, I am at the same time acutely aware that the software tools we use for typesetting today still fall short of the standards of elegance and typographical accuracy that were achieved a century ago by expert typesetters. I think especially of the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906) and the labors of Horace Hart and J. C. Pembrey, singled out by the illustrious editors in the Preface. There is as yet no entirely satisfactory digital edition of this still-important work, though this is probably the best surrogate for now.

Long live paper!

¹ Yes, I would love a Kindle 2 or Sony PRS-505 for all these reasons, except that the bar of the cost of the device is still too high. Despite Steve Jobs' poo-pooing of reading, I think it's only a matter of time before we will see Kindle software running on an Apple portable with a larger screen than the iPhone.

² In fact, in cases where the paper originals are exceedingly complex, I would prefer to have a digital facsimile (e.g., high resolution scans to PDF) to a more searchable format that has been run through optical character recognition software and an editorial proofing process (ideally, such a process would be like the one described by the Chadwyck-Healey publishing team, but the truth is not everyone cares that much or can afford to proofread, and so as generally with the web, search with a grain of salt!).

Examples of facsimile-type editions include an online searchable graphical version of J. Payne Smith's 1903 Compendious Syriac Dictionary, E. W. Lane's never-completed, but still useful 1863 Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as the array of resources at Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies. For Greek and Latin, Project Perseus has some very useful tools.

The searchable books in Amazon and Google Books have trouble with non-Latin scripts and even simple Latin diacritics (e.g., tôrâ for Torah).

UPDATES:

02-Apr-09: added Patrick D. Miller's The Way of the Lord.

04-Apr-09: added links to various editions of classical language reference works.

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