B. H. Roberts’ discourse Joseph Smith the Prophet-Teacher is now available in EPUB, Kindle, and web editions.
Which leaves just six MTP books in our EPUB/Kindle backlog. We’re getting there… (At some point, by the way, I’m planning to also do EPUB/Kindle editions of Jesus the Christ, The Articles of Faith, and The Story of the Mormonism, using the existing Project Gutenberg texts as a base.)
This took a bit longer than I thought it would, but Orson F. Whitney’s Life of Heber C. Kimball is now available in EPUB and Kindle. Enjoy.
I recently saw a short BYU news piece on Robert Barrett. Toward the end of the video, there’s this nugget that stuck with me:
Do I approach religious painting different than normal painting? Actually, I don’t. I pray about everything that I do.
That’s something I need to do more of.
Today’s release: The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, available in EPUB and Kindle editions.
While publishing Grimm in German and Perrault in French was great (and I’ll continue to publish original language editions like them), I’ve long wanted to start publishing fairy tale collections in English. I mean, reading to my kids in 1800s German is cool and all, and I’m certainly planning to do so (along with a delicious array of other old languages), but I have this unshakable feeling that every once in a while they’ll want their stories to be in English. Weird, I know.
So English it is, and Lang’s twelve colored fairy books (published 1889–1910) were the natural place to start. This is the first of the series. Enjoy.
George Q. Cannon’s book My First Mission, an account of his mission to Hawaii, is now available in EPUB and Kindle editions.
I’ve also redesigned the covers for all the MTP books, for what it’s worth. (I’ve redesigned them several times now, but I think this time it’ll stick.)
In other MTP news, we’ve finished initial proofs of William Clayton’s Journal.
I made this piece for the cover of an ebook edition of The Worm Ouroboros (coming soonish) and liked it as a standalone piece of art as well.
Not much has happened with the Mormon Texts Project in the last couple months, mostly because of my tendinitis. The tendinitis hasn’t gotten worse (thankfully), but it hasn’t gone away, either, so I’ll have to be careful going forward (writing scripts instead of doing things manually, etc.). I don’t think I’ll have to stop making ebooks, though.
Anyway, MTP is not dead. But we do have some minor changes happening.
We originally started out making plain text Project Gutenberg editions of these books. Then, in March 2011, we added EPUB, Kindle, and web editions to the lineup. (We’re still working on converting our backlog over, by the way. The EPUB of Life of Heber C. Kimball is done and I’m not too far from finishing up the Kindle edition.)
Starting today, however, we’re now focusing solely on EPUB, Kindle, and web. No more Project Gutenberg.
Why? Time, mainly. I don’t have unlimited free time, and the more formats we produce, the fewer books we make. I’d rather focus on EPUB/Kindle/web (which are all based on HTML/CSS) and get more books out there — besides, anyone is more than welcome to take the source files to our books, turn them into plain text (which is easy since we use Markdown as our base format), and submit them to Project Gutenberg. And I hope people do.
As far as specific books go, we’re getting close to completing the initial proofs for William Clayton’s Journal, Emmeline B. Wells’ Hephzibah, George Q. Cannon’s My First Mission, and Parley P. Pratt’s Voz de Amonestacion (the Spanish translation of A Voice of Warning). And I’m slowly finalizing Essentials in Church History, which is one big book (so it’s taking a while).
Tangentially to MTP, I’m also reformatting the Journal of Discourses EPUB/Kindle editions, because I’ve learned a lot about styling ebooks since I first released them. (The newly formatted versions of volumes 1–9 are already available, by the way.) And I’m finally going through the JD word by word, proofing against the original page images and fixing all the typos, which are legion (I got the text from Wikisource and apparently they didn’t check it very carefully). It will probably take a year or so to finish proofing, since there are around ten thousand pages to go through.
Oh, one last thing: I’ve added a section on the MTP page linking to other sources for free LDS books online. If you know of any that aren’t listed there, let me know.
Time for some more etymological fun.
Algorithm comes to us via Old French augorisme, from the medieval Latin algorism-us. (The Spanish word guarismo “digit, cipher” is also related.)
And medieval Latin got it from the name of the Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who gave us Arabic numerals and algebra (which comes from al-jabr, from jabara, “to reunite, to restore,” and we got it via the Italian word algèbra).
I should also point out that the ibn in al-Khwārizmī’s name, which means “son,” is related to the Hebrew word ben, whence I get my name — Benjamin means “son of the right hand.”
Nowadays maudlin means something is shallow and sentimental, but originally it meant “given to tears.” Not too hard to see how it got there. The interesting thing, though, is that it came from Magdalene (via some Middle English variants, whence the spelling and pronunciation difference), and the OED says it was “in allusion to depictions of Mary Magdalene weeping.”
Wardrobe comes from the Old French warderobe, a northeastern variant of garderobe. And that meant a locked-up chamber that guards your robes, basically. Which makes sense.
Sur- “above” comes from the Latin super, which also means “above.”
Name is an old word that’s cognate in most of the Indo-European languages (seriously, it’s everywhere: namo in Gothic and Old Saxon, nama in Old Frisian, nōmen in Latin, ὄνομα in Greek, ainm in Old Irish, etc.).
Put them together, and you get surname, which means “additional name” — something added to your first name, whether it be a name (occupational, locational, patronymic, what have you) or a title or epithet, as was more common back in the day (Richard the Lionheart, Alexander the Great, etc.).