On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Mark van Gulik wrote:
On Monday, October 29, 2001, at 07:31 pm, Roger Vossler wrote: [...]
So, why on earth would I want to modularize a book? How does one modularize "Gone With The Wind", the Bible, "Lord Of The Rings" or the Iliad? Why would somebody want to do so? How would one do it even if they could?
I love to nitpick,
Me too.
Iliad and Gone with the wind seem easily "modularizable".
But also, all these are examples (losely speaking) of literary texts. Two, at least, are novels (the other two, roughly, are a compilations). Novels, although often serialized, split up, merged, are relatively unitary works.
Textbooks, anthologies, etc. often aren't. It's not uncommon to have a "course guide" in the intro to a textbook (i.e., for a first semenster undergrad course do 1,2,5-7, for a graduate advance, 1-13, plus 15, 17, 19 as interest determines). When making coursepacks, I've often very finely tune the selections (think of anthologies that abridge works in various ways).
Anyhoo....
Cheers, Bijan Parsia.