A WILD BIRD AND A CULTURED MAN

 

The Common Eider and Homo Sapiens:

Fourteen Centuries Together

 

Alexandra Goryashko

 

 

ELECTRONIC VERSION

 

One of the most common questions is if an electronic version of the book is available and how it can be obtained.

 

The answer is no, no way.

 

 

The electronic version is not available and is not being planned.

Part of the reason is of legal nature. Some illustrations were procured from museums, and the agreement allows their use only in a paper edition.

Certainly, pictures can be bought and the agreement rewritten. I will not, however, do it because I do not want to make the book available in the e-form.

 

If you have already held the book in your hands, or even if you saw examples of pages, you would have noticed the rather specific nature of this publication, with a very large number of pictures, footnotes, and cross-references. It was, from the very beginning, conceived and written as a paper book. My deep conviction is that an electronic version of such material, if it could exist, cannot be one large .PDF or some other type of file but only as a separate site with an extensive system of hypertext links. The making and support of such a site is a big project that I'm neither ready nor willing to do. The making of this book required a very large number of people put in a lot of effort, and I think the readers who are truly interested in the book will not mind making an effort to work with the paper version and paying for it.

 

Finally, I think that in the modern, top-to-bottom digitalized world, there should remain objects in their original, the non-digital form. Among these is this book, with its weight and size, its smell of the printing shop that is still quite noticeable, with its smooth pages to be touched. With the joy from contact with a real live book.