He describes in some later edition how he typeset the book himself which is in itself a towering achievement (with him not being a typesetter and all).
Re:Gödel, Escher, Bach
by RockofStrength on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @06:40PM
(#3482454)
Hofstadter cares a lot about form, and thinks it is intimately connected to function. I believe in the end of "I Am a Strange Loop" he said that he edits every single line of text so it fits evenly and aesthetically across the line. In other words, each line must stretch to the far right of the page, but the letters can't be stretched out/separated too much. This must be extremely tedious to accomplish.
...and this is also true for all the translations of the book that I came across.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see an eBook edition too soon. Hofstadter describes himself somewhere (in the GEB preface, maybe?) as very picky about the layout of his books. I remember him saying that he would sometimes rewrite sentences in order to make the layout better.