[HN Gopher] A Venerable and Time-Tested Guide: The Chicago Manua...
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A Venerable and Time-Tested Guide: The Chicago Manual of Style,
18th Edition
Author : NaOH
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-10-24 20:40 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| garciansmith wrote:
| Is this available as a pdf? Or just yet another online
| subscription if you want to search it quickly? Part of the reason
| I never bothered with the 17th Edition was that I couldn't find a
| searchable pdf version (I last tried looking for one years ago
| though). That and they deprecated the use of ibid, which made me
| sad.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| does this mean "is this available as a pdf for no money and
| copyable?"
|
| The book publishing industry is unrecognizable economically
| from what it was 25 years ago. Many people here have no idea,
| dont care and maybe worse. It is important to note that the
| book publishing industry also had its own excesses, some
| warranted and many not. A staple of publishing like this
| Chicago Manual of Style was used and abused to generate excess
| profits no doubt about it. The college textbook industry was
| (and still is) an eggregious offender for economic dark
| patterns.
|
| All said, a no-cost PDF of this book is not the answer in the
| long term IMHO, economics and all considered. (USA here)
| garciansmith wrote:
| I'll gladly pay for a copy. Pretty much everything I write
| uses the Chicago style (I'm a historian), I just want
| something easily searchable and still usable without an
| internet connection.
|
| I love buying physical books, and could get one of the 18th
| edition, but for reference material like this it's much
| quicker to search a digital copy, especially since I know all
| the basics of the style and it's the more obscure edge cases
| I'll need to find.
| simlevesque wrote:
| https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/dam/jcr:bba47b07-61ba-4...
|
| Seems like it's this one.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| .. the one from 1906
| AdamN wrote:
| We believe in the old gods and we only read the eleventh
| edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as well.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Linked PDF says _Copyright 1906_ , and I see no edition
| number -- apparently the first.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| The editors's assumed readership is authors preparing for
| reproduction with full access to capabilities of a printing
| press:
|
| > 75. SET IN SMALLER TYPE. Ordinarily, all prose extracts
| which will make three or more lines in the smaller type,
| and all poetry citations of two lines or more. An isolated
| prose quotation, even though its length would bring it
| under this rule, may properly be run into the text, if it
| bears an organic relation to the argument pre- sented. On
| the other hand, a quotation of one or two lines which is
| closely preceded or followed by longer extracts, set in
| smaller type, may likewise be reduced, as a matter of
| uniform appearance
|
| This although the mimeograph (for copying pages from a
| typewriter) was already in use:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph
| garciansmith wrote:
| I guess I should have specified a pdf of the 18th edition!
| nemomarx wrote:
| The article does mention this link:
| https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/dam/jcr:bba47b07-61ba-4...
|
| as a "fascimile" edition that's free.
| antiframe wrote:
| Is the CMS from 1906 still useful today? I don't know who
| proportion of stylistic mores have changed since then.
| klodolph wrote:
| Chicago is my style guide of choice, although I have an older
| edition. The only real alternative is the AP style guide, which I
| don't favor because I'm not a journalist.
|
| There's a lot of focus on citations in this review, but citations
| are only a small part of the guide. I'm usually looking up things
| like capitalization, punctuation, or quotation rules that I half-
| remember.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| What do you think of the St. Martin's Handbook ?
| klodolph wrote:
| That's a different category of book, I think.
|
| I haven't used St. Martin's, but it looks most similar to
| _Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace_ , which I recommend.
| ghaff wrote:
| AP and Chicago are mostly quite similar although AP differs in
| a few specific things, e.g. no Oxford comma. Where I used to
| work, we generally used Chicago, Merriam-Webster, and IBM but
| we would go with AP for things like press releases because
| journalists generally use AP and we wanted to make it painless
| for them to cut and paste press releases, public company blogs,
| and the like.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| Came in real handy once when the odd Harvard PhD I worked with
| insisted I had written something improperly. She was so confident
| that was beginning to feel like I had lost my mind. This book
| told me that no, no, she was the incorrect one. (iirc it was
| capitalization of certain words in a title or along those lines)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Depending exactly on what you are referring to, this could have
| been an AP vs Chicago thing. Neither is wrong (or correct) in a
| vacuum, but, your editors should pick one style guide and
| adhere to it. Hopefully they will point you towards the style
| guide when you have disagreement over a correction instead of
| keeping you guessing, of course.
| cge wrote:
| It appears there is no legal e-book or offline digital version of
| recent editions of the manual, at any price, with or without DRM.
| There is only the printed, hardcover edition, and a subscription-
| only, online-only website with the contents of the 17th and 18th
| editions, presented as a single paragraph per page, and poorly
| typeset, particularly for symbols. There's no legal way to obtain
| a long-term digital copy of a particular edition; it's not clear
| if the publishers intend to keep editions back to the 17th
| available online for the subscription, or only the two most
| recent editions: this is of relevance to me because I found the
| mathematics chapter particularly useful and unusual for style
| guides, and the authors decided to remove _the entire chapter_ in
| the 18th edition.
|
| Even if calculated as the cost of having access to an edition for
| the approximately seven years it remains the most recent,
| assuming the pricing doesn't increase, and using multi-year
| payments, the legal online-only access involves a subscription
| that would cost close to _four times_ the list price of the
| hardcover book, something that you would own in perpetuity. It
| doesn 't appear that the online subscription's content is
| continually updated, or that it offers any advantage over the
| book beyond being electronic, and having its page views used to
| motivate decisions like removing the mathematics chapter. It is a
| subscription, and online-only, merely by virtue of being a
| digital version of a printed book.
|
| Meanwhile, readers who aren't concerned about using a pirated
| copy can easily obtain a clean, searchable, PDF from page images
| and OCR, with the book's typesetting, and more than one paragraph
| visible at once. This is, of course, usable offline.
|
| The discrepancy between what is available to readers who want a
| legal digital copy, _at any price_ , and readers who don't care,
| is quite disappointing.
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(page generated 2024-10-29 23:01 UTC)