Ye olde releaseys

Preamble

I should have made this/ese release/s years ago, but here's some copies of Unsong. They all currently have claim to being the most complete ebook of unsong, one way or another, though they are all partially incomplete and I hope to shortly make a final, perfect release, at which point these copies will become of merely historical significance. But, since I'm about to get back into this project, I thought I'd post all the imperfect versions I've made along the way.

Copyright/permission notice

The software I and Stuart made to produce these ebooks, as well as the formatting we produced for these ebooks (where nontrivial enough to qualify for copyright), is released into the public domain under the CC0-1.0 License. However, the text itself belongs to Scott Alexander, and the images are property of-- uh, whoever owns them; it's not always totally clear. Anyway, Scott has given his permission to his fans to make ebook and physical book copies of Unsong so long as we don't defect against his chances of getting a real publication deal some day.
Example permission-giving:
Physical book: https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/61x8vz/physical_book/dfl4hef/
Ebook: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/4qnsq5/unsong_mobi_through_latest_post/d4vr3r4/
Translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jmjsi4/how_do_i_contact_scott/gaxbwh0/

Notable features of every version here:

• They all contain every Author’s Note and Postscript, in the order the Author’s Notes are featured on Unsongbook.com, mixed in with the chapters.
• All Hebrew letters are properly encoded and displayed. Most ebook versions of Unsong do this, so it's not very notable, but it was hard.
• Images are embedded in the html as base64 data uris
• They all have a two-level table of contents (TOC), the top level of which is: (Cover), Prologue, Book I, Book II, Book III, Book IV, Epilogue, (Tosefta), where some of these copies may be lacking the parenthetical entries, as described later in these notes. This table of contents lists everything (including the author's notes) more explicitly than the official table of contents (which you can find as the home page of https://unsongbook.com/, though I suspect it is also internally https://unsongbook.com/table-of-contents since that url also works). There's an epigraph on the official TOC, "Jerusalem is builded as a city that is in the public domain.", but this is also the epigraph of Chapter 2 so I decided not to include it in the TOC as well.
• They were all made using unsong-book-fetcher, which produced an html file which could be converted to an epub or a pdf
• They all contain a custom version of the Book I illustration I personally made, removing the text "Book 1" from the illustration (no other books do this) and superimposing the caption text on the image, so that the image would fit better on a book page (This is also how the caption text is laid out in books 2 and 4). I have given Scott full permission to use this improved version of the image in the future if he so chooses.
• Some of the images are of unnecessarily poor quality because I didn't realize I had to strip the w= that appears on the urls of most of the embedded images (compare eg the resolutions of https://i2.wp.com/slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/comet_falling.jpg?w=557 and https://i2.wp.com/slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/comet_falling.jpg)

coarse.Unsong.html (2018)

• Does not include a cover, as I didn't think the programmatically-drawn cover looked very good, and this version was focused on making myself a personal printed copy which would already have a physical cover in the form of binding or something anyway. Incidentally, I then ended up making two title pages for Unsong, which basically just feature the title and author. The serious one is unsong title page.odt and unsong title page its all there edition.odt is a joke title page I used for a copy where I printed out just a little of Unsong to give to my friend who I knew wouldn't read the whole thing. Just to be clear, these title pages are in no way official and are original to me not Scott, though you're welcome to use them for whatever you want.
• Does not include the Tosefta, because this version was made before the Tosefta was! (2018 for this version vs 2019 for the Tosefta as evidenced by https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/c8cg0h/unsong_tosefta_as_promised/ )
• coarse.Unsong.html.pdf was derived from this, using a predecessor of https://github.com/wyattscarpenter/coarse_ebooks. I didn't bother to make an epub.
• At one point I concluded the images in the pdf seemed to be slightly degraded quality compared to the html, probably due to an unchangeable setting in the pdf generator, but I no longer concur with my past observation. I think I was getting confused with the w=557 problem described in the previous section.
• Instead of having unindented text with two newlines between them, the pdf opts for indented lines with one newline between them, which is more conventional in book printing and saves lots of space.
• This pdf is fewer than 300 pages, making it both the most complete and compact version of its time that I am aware of. The old readme that accompanied this claimed "most copies of Unsong are around 700 pages, and do not even include the author's notes"
• The text size is pretty small.
• This pdf was associated with a branch called "manly" because I thought you would need to have really strong eyes to read it. https://github.com/wyattscarpenter/unsong-book-fetcher/tree/manly. The text isn't that small though.
• Each chapter starts on a new page, as you'd expect; this isn't one of those deals where I decided chapters would immediately follow each other in the middle of a page to save space.
• The pages are numbered, and this numbering does not include the Table of Contents.
• The hyperlinks in the pdf still work if you are reading it digitally. The TOC is not hyperlinked.

old.Unsong.html (2020)

• Includes the programmatically-drawn cover
• I probably made this while experimenting with #1
• No Tosefta
• I think my use of <p> is technically more correct in the html of this version than in coarse.Unsong, though this makes no visual difference.
• old.Unsong.epub was derived from this. I didn't bother to make a pdf.
• Oddly, this copy is missing the second half of the the text of Chapter 6, beginning with "Then the book – the nerve of it – moves on!". this is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.

new.Unsong.html (2020)

*This copy is identical to old.Unsong except it contains the tosefta and there is a hidden header by the title which means Cover now shows up in the table of contents in e-readers.

• I probably made this while experimenting with #1
• new.Unsong.epub was derived from this. I didn't bother to make a pdf.
• Oddly, this copy is missing the second half of the the text of Chapter 6, beginning with "Then the book – the nerve of it – moves on!". this is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.