Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
He said nothing of the kind.
He's talking about the alleged superiority of paper as a book medium, and believes that paper has a level of permanence that he believes is not available with ebooks.
No, he doesn't want anyone to change anything about a book once it's published.
|
But he, as an author, has to know that the history of books SHOWS things change when publishers have control over them.
Look at it this way:
Say I write a book. Redcard's Book. And I put it out on the net, and six thousand people download it.
They share it with 2 people each, and those people share it with 2 more.
Now, 24,000 copies of Redcard's Book is out there.
Now those people share it with ten people. 240,000 copies.
Now someone decides to be a jerk, and change one of the copies. He (and everyone else) shares it with ten new unique people. 2,400,000 people now have my book.
10 of them are wrong, 2,399,990 are right. Now imagine everyone gets together to talk about my book, and someone pipes up with a quote, incorrectly, from one of the ten that are wrong? The remaining nearly 2.4 million people shout them down! We can verify Redcard's meaning, look at all these books that say this, look at these TEN that say that. Obviously the ten are in error.
Now, let's play the same thought experiment, but with a heavily paperbook centric world Mr. Franzen imagines. The 6000 people buy the book. They like it. They share it with people, who want it, too, but they want their own copy. Meanwhile, the publisher decides to change a forward to meet the needs of a current presidential election. 6000 people have the book with one forward, 12000 people have it with another. Then let's say this repeats, but this time, one of the main characters who is gay is .. well.. let's say gay's not in in this country that the new 12,000 people are in, so that character gets changed to a female. 6000 people have the book with one forward, 12000 have it with a gay male lead, 12000 have it with a straight hetero lead.
Continue on and on.. times changing, morals changing, the publishing company altering things here and there to "tighten up the story" or "mesh with the movie deal" or whatnot. (If you don't think this is done, believe me, it's done more than you might think. Ask Philip K Dick's estate about it.. or JRR Tolkien's.. Or C.S. Lewis') And with the horrid quality of paper used in modern books, everyone likely has to go out and buy a new copy every 30 to 50 years.. so even THAT changes. Add to that, the increasing terms of copyright.. and well, the book may NEVER enter the public domain.
The fact is, this happens. It's why there are multiple translations of the Bible. It's why companies have copyrights on the Bible, for God's sake. (Ironically, the Koran is not 'official' if translated, so it's largely remained the same text, even though the language changed underneath it.)
So the question is, who do you want in control of your ideas and language? The few, or the many? Because the texts DO change. That's why there are ten to fifteen different versions of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (I collect them) .. IN ENGLISH.. and they all are just a bit different here and there.