Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
No. As I said, if you are faced with a choice of, oh, 10 versions of Silver Princess a year from now, none of them being from PG, how do you know which one to download if you want the undoctored original? Not conspiracy: confusion.
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Download the scans. Or find someone who declares that they are replicating the original as much as possible.
You have no idea if a work was re-edited by the publisher or author, either. Readers who picked up the Nancy Drew books recently aren't told that those aren't the same ones their parents or grandparents loved as children. Poetry, especially, is subject to change; it's not always clear where the original line breaks were supposed to be, and which were added to fit on the paper used originally.
Those who value exact reproductions of a specific edition are always going to be a minority of readers. (I say this knowing full well that Han shot first, and I really wish we had good copies available of that version.)
While I'm not in favor of removing "icky content" from past books, I am in favor of keeping stories alive by making them more accessible to modern readers. There's never going to be a simple hard line that divides those activities; it's always going to be a matter of editorial judgment. I can't see any moral obligation to only do conversion work if one is willing to do an as-much-as-possible exact replica.