[HN Gopher] When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Bac...
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When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks
(2016)
Author : tomodachi94
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-08-16 00:45 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (teresaelsey.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (teresaelsey.medium.com)
| drakonka wrote:
| I only skimmed this, have not yet read in great detail, but it
| made me think about backlists in indie publishing.
|
| This is a thing for self-published authors as well, only we tend
| to take a more optimistic view on the backlist: a large backlist
| is more of a benefit than a challenge. It is necessary to keep
| putting out new books of course to get new visibility, but income
| stability comes not from readers buying your shiny new book - it
| comes from them buying _all of your other books_ after they read
| and enjoy the shiny new book. The backlist is generally
| considered king for a sustainable self-publishing career.
|
| It does come with maintenance, however. As the post mentions, my
| early books are just not very good. Heck my new books are not
| very good either, but they're better than my early books.
| Likewise, covers and blurbs go out of date and need to be
| refreshed once in a while. It is work - but a large backlist is
| in the end what keeps you afloat.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Likewise, covers and blurbs go out of date and need to be
| refreshed once in a while.
|
| Why? The reader understand that they are from another time.
| drakonka wrote:
| Genre fiction readers usually do not want something that
| obviously comes from another time. They want something that
| is just unique enough to catch the eye, but largely similar
| to whatever cover trends are currently popular.
| dsr_ wrote:
| I think you completely misunderstand.
|
| The people who want to read the complete Travis McGee
| series don't want updated covers. They want complete
| metadata and good search tools, so they can figure out that
| The Long Lavender Look comes before A Tan and Sandy
| Silence. The folks who are trying to hunt down ebooks of
| all the non-Fleming James Bond novels don't care much about
| the covers.
|
| And if your epub reader software doesn't allow you to
| change the CSS to your own preferences, it's badly under-
| featured.
|
| "Obviously comes from another time" is either a non-issue
| or a feature, not a bug.
| drakonka wrote:
| I'm sure this is true for some (maybe even many) readers,
| but this simply is not reflective of the larger genre
| fiction market today.
|
| Most genre fiction authors, even those making a great
| living, are not writing the next Travis McGee - they're
| writing thrillers, mysteries, or romance series that will
| not get Wikipedia pages or be turned into TV adaptations.
| Readers will not discover their books thinking "Oh yeah,
| Series X by that Obscure Author Y, I want to read that
| specifically."
|
| Instead, they will stumble across a book in their chosen
| genre on their Amazon search (or top 100 list) or a
| BookBub promo. At best, they'll see a recommendation on
| TikTok or a readers facebook group. Hopefully that book
| will catch their interest with a solid on-market cover
| and blurb. They will read it, and then (hopefully) check
| out the rest of the author's backlist from there -
| judging those books' blurbs and covers as well. If the
| author is lucky and skilled, the reader will turn into a
| superfan and sign up for their newsletter, making it
| easier to sell them new books in the future.
| squidbeak wrote:
| The same reason you repaint your fence occasionally.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Your covers lose their protective coating and will rot due
| to moisture?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| That's not what they meant, but... yes, I suppose that is
| something that could happen to a book cover.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| A very interesting read!
|
| Hyperlinks are a particularly challenging area.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > And here is a lovely classic children's book -- from 1960 --
| that's about two little girls, and a witch, who has a baby, and a
| spelling bee, an actual bee that spells things. And there's a
| minor part of the story where the girls are putting on their
| Halloween costumes, and one is a witch, and the other is "a
| little Chinese girl ... and she had makeup on her face."
|
| > I think we agree at this point that a nationality is not a
| super-cool Halloween costume, but I'm not clear on whether
| Clarissa's putting on yellowface or has just borrowed her
| mother's lipstick. And so how do we handle this? This is not
| Huckleberry Finn -- it's not a book about race, where we talk
| about the history and the controversy. Should we be concerned
| with this type of incidental racism in an ebook that we're
| selling today, one that looks just like the new, and hopefully
| more enlightened, children's ebooks we're publishing in 2015?
|
| That's something I never understood: rewriting books from the
| past to match recent cultural trends. What happened happened,
| whether you like it or not. (I also don't really get the
| Halloween costume controversy, but I acknowledge there's
| something to debate there, unlike with the history-rewriting
| topic which is just dumb).
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| You really don't understand why editors decided to rename
| Agatha Christie's 1939 book _Ten Little Niggers_ in 1985?
|
| Or is that a "recent cultural trend" where you can understand
| why publishers followed the trend and made a change?
|
| Because once someone admits _that_ change was okay, it 's no
| longer a question of principles and just a series of judgment
| calls that different people will make differently.
|
| Publishers make changes to ensure books keep selling.
|
| They are human and don't always make the right decision. But
| they aren't doing it for any reason other than profit.
|
| My daughters are Asian I wouldn't buy them a children's book
| where "be Chinese" is considered an acceptable Halloween
| costume.
|
| The publishers would probably prefer I consider purchasing it.
| GJim wrote:
| Her book was based on a poem of the same name, written in the
| 1800's, in which ten children come to an untimely death.
|
| Famously, Christie set out to deliberately write her most
| technically challenging book, having ten people murdered on
| an island in a manner in keeping with the poem, whilst still
| keeping the reader guessing whodunnit. Most readers agree it
| was her best book by far.
|
| The idea that the book is racist simply because of it's title
| is a rather modern phenomena (not to mention changing the
| title and poem somewhat hides her original challenge).
| alpinisme wrote:
| Nobody in this thread has said the book is racist. The
| question was whether you can see the motivation of
| retitling from a publishers (or for that matter
| booksellers) perspective. If you want people to buy the
| book, the old name is a turn off whether the content is
| raciest or not.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > If you want people to buy the book, the old name is a
| turn off whether the content is raciest or not.
|
| This depends on the audience. For some people it _is_ a
| turn off to adopt the title to a woke zeitgeist.
| alpinisme wrote:
| You're right of course. Some people will buy the non-woke
| title as a protest vote of sorts. And others will go out
| of their way to get an old copy out of a non-political
| sense of loyalty (some of these people were already
| buying the book as a historical object though and would
| have preferred a used copy to start).
|
| But it is not just about people buying the book knowing
| it changed, or buying it because it changed. It's about
| coming across a title like that cold, without knowing any
| context. (Remember: the aspiration of a publisher is
| always to have the book become more popular with new
| formerly uninterested audiences). It's an empirical
| question whether that title will do better than a retitle
| but my money is on the title without the most fraught
| words in the English language on the cover.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of people
| who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in
| modern society.
|
| It is, if nothing else, convenient that I don't have to
| say one of the worst slurs in American English every time
| I discuss Agatha Christie's body of work.
|
| It's worth noting that, for that reason, the book was
| released as "And Then There Were None" in its first US
| edition in 1940; the use of the original title until 1985
| is a UK thing.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of
| people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place
| in modern society.
|
| But I _do_ tend to care about the opinions of people who
| wish that works of the past are not manipulated to fit
| the current zeitgeist - in particular if it is claimed or
| suggest that this is the work as written by the author.
| GJim wrote:
| > who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in
| modern society.
|
| Nobody is wishing they had a more prominent place today,
| nor in the future. Rather, there is a need not to edit
| the past, lest we forget it.
|
| > "And Then There Were None" in its first US edition in
| 1940; the use of the original title until 1985 is a UK
| thing.
|
| I suggest that is because in the USA, particularly in the
| south, political sensitivities about such a title would
| be difficult to overcome and the association with an old
| British poem would be completely lost.
| bloak wrote:
| > the association with an old British poem
|
| Wait, are you sure about that? Wikipedia says "an 1869
| minstrel song". I had assumed it was a song from the USA
| that happened to be fairly well known in Britain.
|
| Also I have the impression that the word "nigger" is not
| traditional in British English. The first time I came
| across the word was when reading Mark Twain. I had
| previously heard several words used for referring to
| darker-skinned people but not that one. Of course that's
| just my experience from one part of the country.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of
| people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place
| in modern society.
|
| As a black American, I'm forced to care about the efforts
| of people to retcon pervasive racism out of history, or
| relegate it to one-dimensional "bad guys." This will not
| save my children from racism, instead it will make them
| absolutely bewildered by the pervasive racism they will
| face, and make them blame themselves.
|
| Rewriting crimes out of history does not help victims, it
| helps perpetrators.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Who said the title implied the book was racist? Nobody said
| that, you're making things up.
|
| You just don't put that word on the cover of a book due to
| "changing cultural trends"
| GJim wrote:
| Your last sentence contradicts your first!
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| No, it doesn't.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > My daughters are Asian I wouldn't buy them a children's
| book where "be Chinese" is considered an acceptable Halloween
| costume.
|
| There also exist people who would rather avoid buying books
| where the publisher changed the content in 1984 style to
| appease the woke moaners.
| GJim wrote:
| It's sad to see your factual statement downvoted.
|
| There was indeed a _huge_ backlash in the UK, amongst
| authors and the public, when publishers sought to edit
| classic children 's books by Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton to
| make them politically correct. Children a quite capable of
| understanding something was written at a different time.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Children a quite capable of understanding something was
| written at a different time.
|
| Even if some person is certain that this is not the case,
| the child's parents hopefully _are_ capable of explaining
| this to their children. :-)
| watwut wrote:
| Even if it was the case, but it is kind of massively
| easier to pick a book where you do not have to explain
| that.
|
| Sometimes you just want to read a book and children books
| are not all that much fun for adults anyway. You might
| not want to then have to go into explaining that racism
| was normal for the author, but we think differently jadda
| jadda ... it is additional completely pointless
| complication for what was supposed to be good night
| story.
| GJim wrote:
| I could not disagree with you more.
|
| It is something you will need to explain to children at
| some point, and doing so over a light hearted story is an
| ideal approach. Shying away from the difficulties of
| bringing up a child isn't something you should be doing.
|
| Besides, the _best_ children 's books are also fun for
| adults! (I raise you Roald Dahl's 'Boy' and Judith Kerr's
| 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea')
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > the best children's books are also fun for adults!
|
| Also Kipling's Just So stories. My eldest loved me to
| read them to him and it was no chore at all.
| 47282847 wrote:
| If you do not find it fun to read with your children and
| enjoy the stories equally you may want to consider
| picking different books or doing something else with
| them. They will pick up on it, and grow up to think you
| do not like to spend time with them - and later take that
| "truth" turned core belief to other relationships.
| boesboes wrote:
| If only those people would read
| pessimizer wrote:
| The people who secretly rewrite literature do not take a
| vote from readers before they do it. They "know better."
| They'll tell you that it's really just administrative,
| they're "updating the language."
| dml2135 wrote:
| Also consider that maybe the parent comment would not have
| bought the book in 1984 either, for the same reason.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Also consider that maybe the parent comment would not
| have bought the book in 1984 either, for the same reason.
|
| With 1984, I meant the book by George Orwell where
| newspaper articles of the past are permanently changed
| (and any references to the existence of the old versions
| are destroyed) to fit the daily political
| climate/narrative.
| GJim wrote:
| > would not have bought the book in 1984 either
|
| In a conversation about censorship being used to alter
| past events, I'm somewhat surprised you didn't understand
| the reference. Can I suggest this is a book you read as a
| matter of some importance:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
| NeoTar wrote:
| There is a difference between consciously erasing the past
| in the 1984-novel style, and re-releasing an updated
| version of a book. The important thing being that the
| original texts are still available - we aren't seizing
| original editions from homes and burning them.
|
| Admittedly that's actually a more complicated when it comes
| to electronic texts which may be automatically updated.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sure, perhaps you rename the book, and maybe they even
| changed the word inside the book. The term is accidental (as
| far as I know) to the mystery and the story.
|
| But removing _nigger_ from Huckleberry Finn would greatly
| destroy the purpose and means of _that_ work - someone has to
| make that decision and weigh it.
| GJim wrote:
| I fail to understand why a story about a child innocently
| dressing up as someone from another culture is perceived by
| some Americans as racist.
| alpinisme wrote:
| It's never really resonated with me either. But I think this
| thread has a good example in it: a patent not wanting their
| child to read a book in which people consider "you" to be an
| acceptable costume (making you feel strange or uncomfortable,
| since kids often don't like being singled out or noted as
| different -- especially not in a way meant to exaggerate and
| lean in to stereotypes). This is doubly true when the kids
| may already feel self conscious about their race due to any
| existing racism they personally encounter in the society.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Counterpoint: St. Paddy's day - where a lot of people dress
| up and claim to be Irish.
|
| Or when someone dresses up as a 1920 gangster, just always
| happen to Italian...
| crooked-v wrote:
| It's really the same rule of thumb of stand-up comedy:
| punching up vs punching down. Western European and North
| American pan-national stereotypes are typically
| comfortably 'up' (though targeting specific ethnicities
| can become 'down').
| dacryn wrote:
| ah come on. It's halloween. Brothers dress up as their
| sisters, sisters dress up as their brothers, kids dress up
| as their neighbours.
|
| You are an acceptable costume. Face it. But context
| matters. The reading kid is not singled out, nobody is
| making this negative. It could also be perceived as a
| celebration 'hey I want to be like my adopted asian sister,
| she is cool'.
|
| Live and let live, and give context if the kid is asking
| questions. But don't censor because you feel like a special
| snowflake
| hoten wrote:
| Kids dress up as their siblings?
| b3ing wrote:
| It's about thinking of people stereotypically, there might be
| a way to do it not so bad but it never is
|
| See these examples
|
| https://www.culturalsurvival.org/sites/default/files/nmai-
| sp...
|
| http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/browbeat/2013/1.
| ..
|
| https://risetowin.org/assets/img/what-we-
| do/educate/resource...
| bdw5204 wrote:
| One reason why authors should self-publish is to prevent their
| books from being bowdlerized by the publisher in the future.
| You can't predict what will cause future "morality enforcers"
| to faint. Self publishing also means you can publish things
| that the current "sensitivity readers" (i.e. censors) would
| never let you publish.
|
| Of course, this isn't foolproof because your descendants or
| heirs might also be willing to bowdlerize your work or even
| take it out of print altogether. So another option would be to
| just release all of your copyrighted works into the public
| domain upon your death allowing anybody who cares to publish
| uncensored copies.
| djoldman wrote:
| > And sometimes we're not sure if what we're seeing even is an
| error. The following passage, from Philip K. Dick, displays a lot
| of creative use of language, but the "zommed" in the third line
| -- while matching the print book -- seems a bit suspect. Should
| it be "zoomed"? How can we know?
|
| Strictly for possible typos: if the author is alive, ask them,
| otherwise leave it.
|
| > Sometimes a book is completely accurate at the time of
| publication, but becomes factually inaccurate over time, giving
| the wrong dates for the beginning of daylight saving time or an
| incorrect planetary status for Pluto.
|
| > Should we fix these factual errors? Do we need the author's
| input? What if the author is dead, the agent is retired, and the
| editor has left the company? Should we fix them silently or with
| some kind of editorial note?
|
| > Then there's the case where the content of a book is not
| incorrect, per se, but may have become outmoded or offensive....
| What do you do here? Do you update the language that's incidental
| to the content of the book? Does it matter who you think is
| buying this -- whether it's people who want the diet advice or
| people who are researching the historic participation of Asian
| Americans in diet programs?
|
| No. A book should capture an author's intent/concept/idea at the
| time it was written and those intents/concepts/ideas should be
| frozen.
| shagie wrote:
| Back in college, I recall a professor saying that German
| students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read
| Nietzsche in translation rather than as it was written. (Upon
| reflection, it might have been Kant -
| https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/28743 )
|
| My latin was too rusty to be able to read Meditations on First
| Philosophy as it was written. (
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306 ).
|
| A translation from Latin to English (
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosop...
| ) necessarily changes those intents/concepts/ideas into those
| that the reader is more familiar with.
|
| A translation from English of 1000 AD to 2000 AD has the same
| necessary changes
| http://www.hieronymus.us.com/latinweb/Mediaevum/Beowulf.htm
|
| Is it ok to read Liu Cixin's work San Ti as Ken Liu's
| translation known to the English speaking word as The Three-
| Body Problem? Or should I learn Chinese and immerse myself in
| the culture of China in order to read it with those intents /
| concepts / ideas as things frozen on paper?
|
| There are two problems - the book captured at its time may not
| be accessible anymore. Secondly, even if you can read the words
| it may be that the words those concepts map to in today's
| language are not the concepts that the author intended.
|
| So... how short of a time frame is not _not_ acceptable to read
| the work in translation?
|
| I hold that a translation across time is not really any
| different than a translation of a modern work across languages
| and cultures.
| djoldman wrote:
| This isn't a problem.
|
| The translation is a new work.
|
| The original work in the original language stays frozen.
|
| Incidentally, the translation is treated the same and is
| frozen in the same manner.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. And each offers its own perspective and has its
| own value.
|
| Sure, if you could only have _one_ you 'd want the original
| work in the original language, but that isn't as accessible
| as translations and other enhancements/improvements.
|
| For example, _Euclid 's Elements_ in the original language
| has no diagrams; almost every translation and even reprints
| with the original have diagrams added. And those diagrams
| haven't been without controversy, either.
| evilduck wrote:
| Individual beliefs aside, the Christian Bible makes for a
| fascinating case study in book translations. Some
| translations are modern takes on an existing language
| translation like translating the King James Bible into
| modern English as literally as possible, while some take
| their own liberties with interpreting the original text as
| it was written and come up with somewhat dramatically
| different results. Translations between languages with
| dramatically different language syntax and grammars exists,
| as well as abridged snippets and (probably) millions of
| derivative texts used for lessons and teaching. And it's
| been going on for over a millennium, so we get perspectives
| on the cultures and languages themselves dramatically
| changing over time too.
| shagie wrote:
| > Individual beliefs aside, the Christian Bible makes for
| a fascinating case study in book translations.
|
| The start of the gospel of John is one that is
| particularly thought provoking for me because we can more
| easily grasp the meaning of the original words.
|
| https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/jhn/1/1/t_conc_998001
|
| En arkhe en o logos kai o logos en pros ton theon kai
| theos en o logos.
|
| en arche en ho logos kai ho logos en pros theos kai ho
| logos en theos.
|
| In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
| and the Word was God.
|
| And you'll note in that logos has been translated to
| "Word". But logos means such _more_ than just "word"
| (the word for _word_ is lexis lexis). Logos, as
| understood in Greek philosophy was
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos
|
| > Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different
| ways. The sophists used the term to mean "discourse".
| Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned
| discourse" or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric,
| and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion
| alongside ethos and pathos. Pyrrhonist philosophers used
| the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident
| matters. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the
| generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows
| related concepts in Neoplatonism.
|
| This was relating the philosophy of the Greeks (even then
| a couple of hundred of years old) to that of the early
| forms of Christianity.
|
| I would contend that "In the beginning was the [ability
| to reason, link the rational nature of the universe to
| rational discourse]" ... but that doesn't fit well in
| translation or even liner notes. And so, we're left with
| the word "Word".
|
| ---
|
| One of the late night Bay Area public TV programs (not
| sure if it was KQED or KTEH) had a once a week program
| back in the late 90s / early 00s that was a verse by
| verse bible study looking at the oldest forms of the text
| and looking at specific word meanings like rasah https://
| www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h7523/kjv/wlc/0-1/ and
| harag https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h2026/kjv/w
| lc/0-1/ - where they are used (you'll note the contexts
| are different while one is killing in general, the other
| is a specific type of killing).
|
| Anyways... it was an interesting program that had a lot
| of linguistic study of ancient languages with the Bible
| as the text being translated.
| 47282847 wrote:
| Why not translate it as "consciousness"? Seems quite
| obvious to me?
| shagie wrote:
| It likely came that way via the Vulgate (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate ) which was a
| translation of Greek into Latin in the fourth century. It
| was the official Catholic version in 1545 - 1563 (the KJV
| was translated in 1611).
|
| in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus
| erat Verbum
|
| Though going back to logos - even that word changed
| meaning over the the centuries from Heraclitus (5th
| century BC) ( https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/17-the-
| heraclitean-logos/
| https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/12/logos-of-
| hera... https://modernstoicism.com/heraclitus-and-the-
| birth-of-the-l... ) to the neoplatonist school (3rd
| century AD)
|
| The early Christian church traditions were a battlefield
| of dueling scriptures and philosophies.
|
| Some books that I'd recommend on that area. Note that my
| approach to the Bible isn't one of a believer but rather
| as another work of ancient philosophy (which was my
| favorite philosophy class of my almost not getting a CS
| degree) and stoicism is the branch within there that I've
| read the most of.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Stoicism-Early-Christianity-
| Tuomas-Ra...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-
| Scripture...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Scriptures-Books-that-
| Testament/...
| dhosek wrote:
| I've often wondered if Greeks were at a disadvantage in
| reading Homer since they would have the choice of reading
| either the essentially foreign original text or what would
| feel like a bowdlerization as a modernized text, while
| translations to other languages wouldn't have that same
| negative association connected to them.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Funny thing is the original _text_ probably didn't even
| exist. Mainstream theory is that Iliad was a purely oral
| tradition at first and was written down (not written) a few
| decades or centuries later. The sack of Troy happened
| shortly before the Late Bronze Age Collapse which among
| other things destroyed the Greek writing system now known
| as the Linear Script B. The Greek Alphabet had only
| appeared 3 centuries later and the period in between is
| often referred as the "Greek Dark Ages", since there was no
| writing system for the Greek language at that time.
|
| One way to see Iliad is as a bard's song about lost good
| time before the apocalypse -- when Greek cities were
| mighty, trade flourishing, armies big etc.
| mcguire wrote:
| Don't forget that you're not reading the text as it was
| originally written; the surviving texts are copies of
| copies. Reconstructing, partially, the original text is
| possible if you have many downstream copies from different
| sources but never perfect.
| scarmig wrote:
| Douglas Hofstadter (of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ fame) has
| written a whole lot about this and related questions.
| _Translator, Trader_ is a great essay (my favorite work of
| his) that anyone who thinks about translation and its
| implications a lot should check out.
| allturtles wrote:
| > Sometimes a book is completely accurate at the time of
| publication, but becomes factually inaccurate over time, giving
| the wrong dates for the beginning of daylight saving time or an
| incorrect planetary status for Pluto.
|
| > Should we fix these factual errors? Do we need the author's
| input? What if the author is dead, the agent is retired, and
| the editor has left the company? Should we fix them silently or
| with some kind of editorial note?
|
| I think it's bizarre to call the "factual errors" at all. Would
| you alter a book from 1958 that "incorrectly" refers to
| Eisenhower as the current U.S. President? Such "fixes" would be
| a defacement of the historical record, flattening all of time
| into a perpetual now.
| NeoTar wrote:
| It depends on the book.
|
| If it is a novel, then clearly not. A fact-book, that lists
| the current heads-of-state of all world nations, then
| possibly yes.
|
| It's ultimately a decision for the author/publisher for each
| book. Is this a living text that should be kept up-to-date,
| or a historical record - after all, a book which lists all of
| the heads-of-state in 1958 is _also_ valuable for different
| contexts.
|
| Perhaps more importantly - if a book says something dangerous
| - like a cook-book saying "add a few flakes of cyanide for
| flavour" is _that_ grounds for an update, or editors note in
| an otherwise historical record text?
| GJim wrote:
| > A fact-book, that lists the current heads-of-state of all
| world nations, then possibly yes.
|
| It's a book, not a web page!
|
| I have old astronomy books that indicate the visual
| appearance of Mars changes due to seasonal vegetation! This
| was obviously updated in later editions; the old edition
| remains as an important historical record of what we once
| thought.
|
| > if a book says something dangerous
|
| Old editions of the 'Home Doctor' recommended using petrol
| to treat headlice. Granted this is probably more dangerous
| than the advice given by some modern heath guru's diet
| books.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| > I have old astronomy books that indicate the visual
| appearance of Mars changes due to seasonal vegetation!
|
| Well that's fascinating, do you happen to have an example
| of such a textbook that could be found online?
| allturtles wrote:
| > A fact-book, that lists the current heads-of-state of all
| world nations, then possibly yes.
|
| If you want to sell an up-to-date, 2024 factbook, you
| should commission one. Providing up-to-date fact books is
| not a function that a back catalog can or should serve. You
| shouldn't take a 1950s fact book and try to make some ham-
| handed edits to it and sell it as if it's the same book.
|
| > if a book says something dangerous - like a cook-book
| saying "add a few flakes of cyanide for flavour" is that
| grounds for an update, or editors note in an otherwise
| historical record text?
|
| If a publisher feels that issuing a particular book in
| ebook form would be injurious to the public, than they are
| certainly within their rights to not issue it. Or to add an
| editorial note "This book is for historical interest only,
| don't try to use the recipes, because for some reason the
| author was trying to kill all their readers." Again there
| are a zillion cookbooks and it's not hard to get someone to
| write a new one.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm reminded of the (canceled) edition of Salinger's _Hapworth
| 16, 1924_ where Salinger insisted that the text be reproduced
| exactly as it was in _The New Yorker_ including any typos that
| appeared there.
| everforward wrote:
| > No. A book should capture an author's intent/concept/idea at
| the time it was written and those intents/concepts/ideas should
| be frozen.
|
| Given that we're talking about ebooks, whose readers generally
| have some kind of navigation system, I think it would be
| reasonable to include a footnote. If a book says Pluto is a
| planet, I wouldn't mind a [1] linking to a note that says
| "Pluto has not been considered a planet since $year.
| $LinkToWikipedia".
|
| I agree that actually changing the content is a bad idea, but I
| do think it would be valuable to link to up-to-date information
| in a non-intrusive manner.
| HalfRadish wrote:
| This captures a new problem that's sort of sneaked in with the
| advent of digital publishing.
|
| In a print book, you can make corrections or revisions in a new
| edition, but the old edition is still potentially out there, in
| libraries and private collections, preserving its own history.
|
| In a digital publication, if you make a revision, the old
| edition disappears by default; older versions are only
| preserved if someone does so deliberately.
|
| At the very least, the reader should be informed of the initial
| publication date as well as the dates of any revisions, which I
| believe is already standard practice in the print world. This
| is essential context for the reader.
|
| When a text revised in 2024 purports to be [entirely] from
| 1948: bad. When a revised text mostly written in 1948 purports
| to be [entirely] from 2024: also bad. To me, this is way more
| important than the question of whether or not to make revisions
| per se.
| NeoTar wrote:
| But an advantage of digital texts _could_ be that you buy a
| text in 2024, and it shows you all revisions of the text from
| 1948 to 2024...
| bityard wrote:
| I'm okay with someone taking an older work and editing it to
| suit their own (necessarily personal) ideas of political
| correctness, but only so long as it is made obvious somewhere
| on the cover and title page that it is not the original work.
|
| Anything else is fundamentally underhanded.
| creer wrote:
| How did we ever manage with paper print? The mind boggles. (We
| managed with later printings and later revisions. Which is one
| reason people sometimes seek an earlier edition or printing.)
| bbarnett wrote:
| Before ebooks, a bunch of friends and I used to memorize the full
| contents of a book, each. We'd then destroy the books.
| nervysnail wrote:
| Were they radical political books? Erotica?
| bombcar wrote:
| Statistically the most likely book is _The Very Hungry
| Caterpillar_ which most children memorize and then destroy.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| Especially apropos that the first link in the article is a 404.
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