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The deep irony here, so deep that I'm surprised Mr Franzen wandered into this subject area of "hard copy having more of a sense of permanence", is that when the UK edition of his novel FREEDOM was published in 2010, he was invited on to a BBC arts programme to do a reading from the novel. He had to stop mid-reading, red-faced, as he realised that the UK edition of his novel was not the version that had been supposed to go to press. Thousands of copies of the hardback subsequently had to be pulped. Readers who had already bought it were offered refunds by British book-shops. Even more ironical, however, was that the novel had already been reviewed and no critic had noticed the typos and other mistakes that necessitated the book's hard-copy recall.
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