[Catlady]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

So, you are saying the copyright owner had no moral right to make changes to the Nancy Drew books? The point is that with the Nancy Drew books, the changes were made without informing the reader what changes were made and without informing the reader what changes were made. The problem that you think is so bad with e-books is clearly worse with paper books, because with paper books, the original gets buried.

Are you deliberately misreading?

I said--and you can go back to the original post when I brought up Nancy Drew--that Nancy was a Syndicate creation and the Syndicate could do whatever it liked with the character and the books. They own the rights. I don't have to like it, and I don't, but I never questioned the absolute right of the creator/copyright holder to do what they will.

I don't believe an individual with a computer has a moral right to tinker with the text of someone else's published work in the public domain (beyond, possibly, the correction of an obvious typo, like teh for the). Obviously, if you do it for your own personal version of the text, that's your business, but I think it's wrong wrong wrong to foist your sanitized/corrected/new and improved version on the masses and pretend it's the real McCoy.

It is possible that their could be some wild conspiracy to eradicate the original version, but it is extremely unlikely. Amazon, for example, COULD eradicate the original version of a book from its servers, and only chose to stock an edited version. But is every retailer going to be in on the conspiracy? If it is documented that the book is not the original, but is edited, there's no problem. If you don't like it, don't read it.

Oh come on. Who said there's a conspiracy? Who even hinted at it? What is entirely possible, though, is a confusion of different versions. The Silver Princess book, for example, is now published in one version. Don't you think someone else--or several someone elses--might publish another version, with different changes, maybe documented, maybe not. Changes and/or errors can be perpetuated endlessly, until the original is a faint memory.