# 90 CDs Still Waters Revival Books, Worth it?



## Kenneth_Murphy (Sep 6, 2008)

In looking at the forums for AGES reviews, I saw the Book sets from Still Waters Revival Books being briefly mentioned.

If any of you own some of these are they good quality? The amount of material appears to be massive but their web pages are very hard to follow.

If these are all PDF's then I'm assuming they are all search able and can be marked up and annotated etc in programs like PDF Annotator?

They are offering all 90 of their CD's for $700 through Monday 9/8. The cost for the several LOGOS puritan prepub works add up to well over this figure. But it looks like with this set one would get a massive amount of additional material. So it comes down to the quality of the text ( amount of typos, readability etc) are the OCR'd or just scan's like GOOGLE books? Do they have indexing/searching across books?

Any opinions on this resource are welcome.


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## DMcFadden (Sep 6, 2008)

There is always controversy about Still Waters because of some questions about copyright violations. Much of their material is simply a PDF of old Puritan books, replete with the orthographic difficulties as well as the considerably dated style. They have a "workaround" for handling the indexing issues, but it is not ideal.

PB's own Matthew McMahon opines: "They have many excellent rare books, especially out of print resources, which many would never be able to attain unless they were quite wealthy. They sell them in "facsimile fashion" very cheap, and they are in Canada which affords US citizens a discount based on the exchange rate!"


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## N. Eshelman (Sep 6, 2008)

Kenneth_Murphy said:


> They are offering all 90 of their CD's for $700 through Monday 9/8.



With SWRB, the sale with be miraculously extended for '3 more days only'. Then it will be discounted at 85% off for the next 2 weeks. Basically, their stuff is always on sale. 


(I was trying to reflect their site with the crazy HTML.)


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## N. Eshelman (Sep 6, 2008)

DMcFadden said:


> There is always controversy about Still Waters because of some questions about copyright violations.



Yep.


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## greenbaggins (Sep 6, 2008)

The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!). SWRB should then be paying EEBO for the right to sell these books, as I am sure there is an agreement that EEBO has everyone make that these books cannot be duplicated, or given out. On the other hand, everyone wishes EEBO would be free to everyone, since no copyrights exist on the books themselves.


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## timmopussycat (Sep 6, 2008)

greenbaggins said:


> The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!). SWRB should then be paying EEBO for the right to sell these books, as I am sure there is an agreement that EEBO has everyone make that these books cannot be duplicated, or given out. On the other hand, everyone wishes EEBO would be free to everyone, since no copyrights exist on the books themselves.



There is a way to get EEBO access relatively cheaply. Just look around for a nearby University that has EEBO access and remote viewing of online books. Then get library privileges. Here in Vancouver the cost at UBC is 40.00 (Canadian) per term.


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## NaphtaliPress (Sep 6, 2008)

timmopussycat said:


> greenbaggins said:
> 
> 
> > The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!). SWRB should then be paying EEBO for the right to sell these books, as I am sure there is an agreement that EEBO has everyone make that these books cannot be duplicated, or given out. On the other hand, everyone wishes EEBO would be free to everyone, since no copyrights exist on the books themselves.
> ...





greenbaggins said:


> The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!). SWRB should then be paying EEBO for the right to sell these books, as I am sure there is an agreement that EEBO has everyone make that these books cannot be duplicated, or given out. On the other hand, everyone wishes EEBO would be free to everyone, since no copyrights exist on the books themselves.



And some U's do not care; it is only important to get a card if you want borrowing privileges; but check non student policy first before monopolizing a campus PC.
Unless you are getting them dirt cheap on a resale there is very little reason to get the SWRB stuff (unless you know they have some original scans; in most cases I imagine original scans will be tons better than any EEBO page images, which is why you cannot generally rely solely on EEBO versions for preparing any text for reprinting).


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## Pergamum (Sep 6, 2008)

I would rather have one real book that I can hold and that does not have crazy old type than 900 PDFs that I have to really search through to find anything. I have the whole set and I think I scanned it once, started to read an old book, got bored, stopped and never went back - picking a book off my shelf instead.


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## py3ak (Sep 6, 2008)

If you have the patience to sort through it, there is much of inestimable value on there. I think of George Hutcheson's commentary on the Minor Prophets, for instance, or the fact that you can see pretty much all of the works of John Brown of Haddington in an easily readable scan.


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## Ginny Dohms (Sep 6, 2008)

greenbaggins said:


> The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!).



That statement ONLY applied to the Puritan Bookshelf set. They have long since stopped selling that CD set, after an agreement was reached with EEBO. So none of the CD sets that SWRB presently sells (including the Reformation Bookshelf CDs, or the new sets that they are in the process of compiling) have any copyright violation issues, since none contain any books/pdfs that were acquired through EEBO. I just wanted to set the record straight for those who may have believed otherwise. Thanks.


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## greenbaggins (Sep 6, 2008)

Ginny Dohms said:


> greenbaggins said:
> 
> 
> > The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!).
> ...



Thanks very much for this clarification. Repentance is a good thing!


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## N. Eshelman (Sep 6, 2008)

Ginny Dohms said:


> greenbaggins said:
> 
> 
> > The copyright violations issue has to do with SWRB copying books that Early English Books Online made available (and charges for!).
> ...



That may be, but I still would not buy from them. in my opinion, the quality is poor. Go with AGES and then sign up at a university/seminary for EEBO and ECCO for the rest of what you will need.


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