Since I have my own software to track PDF publication uploads and changes on JW.org and simplify publication downloads, I looked behind the reasons why certain publications had been updated this last month (first the Know the Truth tract in Hungarian — which I knew of it didn't have any recent textual revisions, and then Bible Teach book, which had suffered a further update — the picture on page 3 was replaced). I noticed one little procedural change, which 99 percent of the Witnesses won't even notice, but the publications printed since the start of this service year no longer have "All Rights Reserved" on the publishers' page. First I thought it was a mistake, but it's for real. Since all publications had it before, there must be some legal reason behind its removal. Are there some rights pertaining to the literature which Watch Tower are unable to reserve?
Tiny procedural change
by Caminante 10 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Jeffro
Just a guess, but it's probably because they say (elsewhere) that the literature is "published by Jehovah's Witnesses", which - unlike the Watch Tower Society - isn't a corporation.
In any case, the use of "All rights reserved" is essentially redundant with respect to copyright law, and has been since 2000.
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Jeffro
I was just doing some checking on the JW.org downloads site, and found it amusing that whilst most of the publications are 'proper' generated PDFs, the Greatest Man book is a dodgy scanned version. They haven't even done text recognition on the actual content of the book.
Bible Stories book is also a dodgy scan.
I looked behind the reasons why certain publications had been updated this last month
Moving away from the re-scanned versions to PDFs generated from scratch is probably the reason.
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Caminante
No, it's not scanned. The old version of MEPS Composition (pre-1997) generated text as a separate layer of black and white (1-bit) bitmap. Current reprints use the latest renditions on file. For example the Family Happiness book (printed in 1996) has the covers (designed after 2001) laid out using text as text, the pages with text as image except a page that was updated to reflect "volumes 1 and 2" of the Young People Ask books.
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Jeffro
Caminante:
No, it's not scanned. The old version of MEPS Composition (pre-1997) generated text as a separate layer of black and white (1-bit) bitmap. Current reprints use the latest renditions on file.
Seriously? Well the glyphs are crappy quality (these could have been output to the bitmap at a higher resolution but weren't), and there's no text recognition apart from the re-done covers and the table of contents. Very poor.
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Caminante
The crappy quality is because the PDFs uploaded to JW.org have all images reduced to 150 ppi. There are exceptions to that too. E.g. The tract Know the Truth in Shona (kt_CA.pdf) is 32 MB in size (while other language editions are 300-500 KB), because it has the images at 300 ppi (and compressed differently).
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will-be-apostate
Are you hungarian, caminante? Anyways.. about the bible teaching book: i noticed long before that in the chapter that deals with the soul topic they changed the candle picture too. First it was a distinguished candle with smoke (very suggestive). The present pricture is without the smokes. When they published the book I also thought "what if the student says that the smoke could represent the inmortal soul".
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will-be-apostate
I've sent you a PM.
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Jeffro
Caminante:
The crappy quality is because the PDFs uploaded to JW.org have all images reduced to 150 ppi.
That sounds pretty ridiculous for a large publishing company that has always claimed to be on the forefront of publishing technology. They managed to come up with unnecessarily large files and still have crappy quality. Genius. It's quite odd that they haven't since replaced the large files with smaller files of better quality, at least in the more common languages.
And the Greatest Man book probably needs some 'New Light'™ updates anyway...
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fastJehu
@ Caminante:
About the changes in the bible-teach book have a look here:
The org is inserting an ISBN number into there printings - so the "all rights reserved" is no longer needed - just my thinkings