lybrary wrote:Bill Mullins wrote:Further, if you make more changes to it, I will have no way of knowing that you did so unless I take the initiative and download a new copy, and do a page-by-page examination.
You will either get an email with update info or you will see the link in your digital shelf turn red. That is the sign that a new version is available. If the email does not arrive in your inbox there is nothing I can do about it. Check your spam folder and whitelist lybrary.com.
I've checked my spam folder, and there is nothing there. Can you please resend, to the email address in my account, any update emails you've sent about "The Hunt for Erdnase" since 11/30? Or barring that, do you recall anything you've changed in the book since then?
Bill Mullins wrote:If I want to have a conversation with another reader about the contents, we don't have any way to confirm that we both are talking about the same thing unless we exchange the parts under discussion.
Yes you do. You compare the PDF creation date. Instead of saying I have "The Hunt for Erdnase version 4.7" you say I have "The Hunt for Erdnase 11/30/2016". The information is all there. And since other magic publishers do not routinely issue lists of changes for new editions I don't see the need why I should do it. It is not common practice. I have also not received any customer feedback on this issue except yours here.
But identifying different editions is only the lesser part of the problem. What is important is identifying the changes. I've found two changes made between the copy I bought 11/30 (PDF creation date 11/2/2016) and the current one on the digital shelf (PDF creation date 12/18/2016):
- p 17: "Richard Hatch was the first to note" changed to "Tom Sawyer was the first to note"
- p 41: "362880 permutations" changed to "90270 permutations" (this error from a member of the Royal Statistical Society!) (Earlier, Chris, you asked about other's work being used without credit. This is another example -- I did these calculations
here. Olsson has said he read the entire thread, so I can only presume this is where he got the correct information.)
(Thanks to Richard Hatch for alerting me to these)
Can this be crowdsourced? Can the other customers of the book post the PDF creation dates of their copies?
I am certain Gallaway did perform magic.
Okay, so what tricks did he perform?
Maybe since you are not a native speaker of English, you don't recognize that "magic wand" and "bag of tricks" are both used far more often as figures of speech, than they are as literal expressions. You've mentioned that you used Newspaperarchive.com as a source for data about Gallaway. Seach for both phrases ("magic wand" and "bag of tricks") during March 1930, when the show happened. You will see that the vast majority of the time, they are used figuratively, rather than literally. Given that the reviewer didn't mention any conjuring to place it into context, there is no reason to suspect that they were used literally here.
And for those who want to find the difference between two PDF files get for example a free software called diffpdf (available for Windows and Linux). This will allow you to quickly see what has changed. See, wasn't too hard. Problem solved.
No, it's not solved, it's simply moved from the vendor to the customer.