[davem]

Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

The computer has a lot to offer in the management of drafts, notes, and multiple versions, especially for someone with such a large and complex amount of such things to keep straight.

Exactly - & in Tolkien's case that would have meant no HoM-e - in fact, no Sil as we have it at all - there would have been no multiple drafts for him to play around with, return to, amend, switching around different versions. We'll never see anything like HoM-e in the future, because writers no longer work that way, & that's because the computer has made it unnecessary - & as a nasty by product has bequeathed us the dreaded 'Extruded Fantasy Product':

That was a sign of things to come. Publishers began to discover the selling-power of big books and multi-volume novels, and after the disappearance of the dollar paperback, made them the mainstay of their business. The loose and sloppy prose of the word-processor generation was perfectly suited to their needs. They were publishing books in greater numbers and at greater length than ever before, with editorial staffs constantly shrinking; one hears of cases where a single editor is expected to acquire and publish a hundred books per year. Meanwhile print runs were shrinking, advances and royalties remaining static at best; so that a mid-list author, to survive, had to become a hack, churning out vast quantities of work and sending them to press only half revised. The result: countless acres of what in our especial field is called, with a perfectly justified sneer, ‘Extruded Fantasy Product’. (The more general term ‘Extruded Book Product’ is occasionally used as well. I Googled that phrase and found to my chagrin that my own LiveJournal profile topped the list.) http://superversive.livejournal.com/49083.html

I think its perfectly possible to argue that Tolkien's entire legendarium is as much a product of the 'limitations' he faced in terms of producing the work as anything else. He produced the work in the same way as his characters created the Red Book - by writing it with a pen & paper at a desk. In other words, I don't think the means he used were simply incidental to the creative process involved.

And yet I'm not using a pen & paper to produce this text.....

But... I think its important to recognise that computers/websites are not merely a 'different' form of the book - they are something entirely different & the approach to producing & telling the story is entirely different. A generation (maybe two or three away) brought up entirely on e-texts/websites will not 'get' a book like LotR in the way we do, because 'books' will not carry the same meaning or relevance to them.