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Originally Posted by LuvReadin
Excuse me, but that's exactly what you are in danger of doing. You are setting yourself up as the beginning of a chain of Chinese Whispers, drawing the text further and further away from the author's intended meaning, and possibly ending up, if other people repeat your process, with something that is unrecognisable from the original.
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The author's intended meaning assumed the reader had access to a cultural setting that no longer exists.
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And how precisely, are they going to do that if you don't tell them what you've done (which, from what you've written previously, you don't)?
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From what was said, the original text will also be included, or perhaps a link to scans will be included. People who want THE ORIGINAL VERSION are welcome to acquire it. People who want to read a version formatted for modern readers will have to cope with editorial decisions--changes in format (what if the original had no TOC? Does that mean the ePub shouldn't have a TOC?), fonts (what if the author thought it was VERY IMPORTANT that chapter titles get a scripty font? What if the original had long sections that were handwritten? Is the form of the words irrelevant but the phrasing is crucial?), punctuation (spaces before and after emdashes? Endashes? No spaces? Hyphenations at ends of lines--how do you know if that was intended to be a hyphenated word or a compound word?), and sometimes words and phrasing.
Changing "aeroplane" to "airplane" is not an insult directed at the author. It's a change to make the text seem like a more modern story; using archaic phrasings and spellings sets the story in a particular era. The author, of course, did not set their story in 2012 because they had no way of knowing what elements of society would change by then. Forcing the reader to acknowledge "THIS TAKES PLACE SEVERAL DECADES AGO" is just as much a denial of the author's original meaning as changing the phrasing.
When you edit a public domain work, you
don't have the option of making it "as the author intended." The author intended it to be read by his or her contemporaries, which we are not. The author intended people to know which elements of technology were commonplace and which were exotic and new to the characters. The author intended people to recognize which characters were overtly bigoted, which were quietly status-quo in their support of bigotry, and which were progressive and liberal-minded. The author intended readers to recognize high-status and low-status characters by cues of dress and language.
Keeping the original text exact can fail to get across the author's message.
Some authors would no doubt be offended at changes in the slightest bit of their text. Some, however, would be pleased that someone had gone to the effort of trying to figure out their intent and make sure the words supported that message.
And who am I, who is Muckraker, to be figuring out the author's intents? We are, like anyone else, readers who care about the themes and messages in books, and want them understood by new readers.
People who insist that it's okay if books are only understood by people who've studied the era in which the book was written are, of course, welcome to stick to exact reprints. If they can find them, because most publishing houses don't bother to mention when they tweak a few words and update archaic spelling.
People who insist that children should be pushed to read books that are set in a world nothing like the one they grew up in, and that an adult should be on hand to guide them into the "correct" understanding of passages that make no sense to them, are also reinterpreting the author's words--they're just claiming that it's acceptable to do so vocally but not textually.
Textual idolatry: The printed word is sacred; the understandings, explanations, commentary and media shifts are less important. I can understand that approach, but I don't agree. I'm in the group that thinks the important part is the message, the story, and that has to be shifted to fit the audience.
In most cases, the shifts are tiny--changes in formatting to modern standards, changes in punctuation, fixing typos, the occasional incomprehensible word or word that's drastically shifted meanings corrected to a more modern one. Sometimes the shifts are bigger--condensed versions offered for children, so they don't have to wait until they're able to read an 80,000 word text to learn the basic story, changing the accompanying artwork to something that's as inoffensive today as the original was in its day, updating the technology so the reader isn't thrown a century into the past to follow the storyline.
An ethical editor notes what scope of changes they've wrought in the story, but there is no option of "don't make any changes at all." Even an exact replica isn't "the same" as it was when the story was written; the surrounding context is different.