Dear closed access publisher,

Thank you for your interest in my Side-by-Side-by-Side edition.

At the bottom of the page you linked to, you'll see some licenses listed.
The first one indicates that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
is in the public domain.

You might be new to the publishing industry, so let me explain that what
it means for a work to be in the public domain is that anyone can do
anything they want with it. I indicated that there because I wanted people
to know that. It means you don't need to ask my or anyone else's permission
to make use of it. So yes, it goes without saying that you can use the
German text on my site.

I understand why you want it in a MS Word file. That's the industry
standard. I'm sure it's more convenient for me to provide that for you
than for you to do it yourself. It might take as long as 30 seconds for
you to do yourself. One very difficult method would involve visiting the
page you linked to, hitting Ctrl-A to select all, hitting Ctrl-C to copy
and then opening MS Word and hitting Ctrl-V. I'm sure it would be very
annoying to have those hyperlinks there afterwards. You might have to go
to the trouble of doing a complicated "Replace All"-type command in MS
Word. I realize that computers can be difficult, and these skills can
be difficult to learn. I think my daughter would have been happy to help
you complete this task when she was six, but alas, she's a teenager now,
and sometimes they get preoccupied with other things.

I can relate to doing hard work for the sake of publishing. The very
project you linked to was a passion project of mine which I did in my
spare time. It took hundreds of hours of unpaid work. I was only motivated
to do it because I wanted a high-quality version of Wittgenstein's
important text to be available open access to everyone in the world, even
to people who do not have the money to pay for expensive academic texts.
It was so much work that I felt it necessary to limit myself to only six
different versions, and didn't get around to posting a MS Word file. What
a shame.

It feel so bad about it because, correct me if I'm wrong, all you really
want to is to make me feel better about all the work I did, by taking part
of it, and give it to a translator and editor, so that they can take what's
in the public domain, create a new version of it that is your own private
domain, make it closed access, and sell it for money, without offering me
any of that money. I do wish I had more money. Maybe then I could lend it
to someone in a developing country so that they could afford to buy the
version you are planning. But let's face it, people in developing
countries aren't interested in fancy things like philosophy anyway.
They're too poor to appreciate intellectual things.

I really wish I could provide the MS Word file and spare you those 30
seconds. I really do. But the computer I'm using runs this funny open
source operating system called GNU/Linux, and Microsoft knows better than
creating a version of MS Word that runs natively on something as strange
as GNU/Linux. So I cannot make use of the 30 second procedure I described
earlier. Maybe someone who knows more about computers than you or I would
know of another way of creating a Word file from an html or epub file.
Unfortunately, I'm sure none of those people work at a publishing company
like the one you work for. Some people I know think I'm good with computers,
but of course they're silly, since I feel so powerless to help you
out and save you that 30 seconds of work.

Wait, I think I have an idea! I also just happened to have taken the source
files and source code of the scripts I used to generate the six different
versions and put them in a git repository. I think I even linked to that
repository on the webpage for my project. How smart of me! I think I even
made the repository open to the public, so you should be able to visit it
with one of those web browsery things. Yes, I know I did, because I
remember it wanted me to apply a license to the code. I chose the GNU
General Public License v3. I placed a notice of that license at the bottom
of the README you'll see if you do visit that page. You'll find it right
under where I give detailed instructions for how someone could use those
source files to create their own custom version of the Tractatus, including
versions that only contain the German text, which might be handy for someone
in a situation like yours. But I worry I might not have done a good enough
job, because not everyone has the same computer skills, and I should have
taken that into account. Doing these things right takes just way too much
of that hard work I mentioned earlier. Darn!

But the worst part of it is that I probably picked the wrong license.
According to the GPL, if you wanted to fork that code, modify it, and make
use of it for your own publicly available project, which the license
completely allows anyone in the world to do without asking, you'd also have
to make your changes public and open source. But then there's a chance
someone might be able to use that code to create a version of the Tractatus
for themselves that might make it less likely that they would buy the one
you're planning, and your company might make less of that money we talked
about earlier. I'm sure the people you work for would be upset by that. I
wouldn't want the project I put all that effort into to play any part in
making that happen.

Well, at least you might still be able to do *something* with the
materials I put on my website for others to use. You'll notice at the
bottom that it says that the layout is licensed Creative Commons - Share
Alike - Attribution. This license applies to such things as the SVG images
I created to duplicate what was in older versions of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus, and the stylesheets I wrote for doing things like formatting
the logical content correctly. I picked a Creative Commons license because
I wanted to spare people who wanted to make use of my materials for their
own projects to have to go through all the hassle of redoing those things
for themselves, and so I offered them to make use of my work for free. But
I was selfish, I realize now. The "Attribution" part apparently means that
if someone did make use of my work, they'd have to let people know that I
helped them. That might seem like I was taking credit for all the hard
work they did, like possibly taking 30 seconds to create a MS Word file.
I'm so sorry! And again, the "Share Alike" thing means that if you made any
modifications of the work I did and used it in your project, you'd have to
also make it available to others to do something similar. That also might
again make it easier for them to create their own version of the Tractatus
that might lessen the chance of you making money from selling yours, and
we've already covered how terrible that would be.

So in the end, I have to apologize for not being helpful enough to you in
your very noble work. I'm just a professor in the faculty of a major
public institution of higher education. There are people who might consider
it compatible with my job description to educate people, and I foolishly
thought by making this work so publicly available it might make it easier
for them to study Wittgenstein's philosophy, learn from it and gain
valuable intellectual skills. But here we are left in this difficult
quandary, so maybe I should rethink my past decisions. I'll put a lot of
reflection into that.

With apologies,

Kevin