[GrannyGrump]

I've been lurking this thread for the longest, but just want to add one small comment about uploads to the MR library. Many of us do use Project Gutenberg's text as a starting point, but the interesting thing is that Gutenberg seldom identifies which edition they have transcribed.

In my own experience, I have seen drastic changes when comparing scans of different editions from Archive.org. Later editions often have lots of revised spelling and punctuation.

You would think that the first edition would be a safe bet, right? Not always.

In at least two books that I uploaded here, there were substantial differences between the American first edition and the British first edition (Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Following the Equator). In both of these cases, the British edition was more faithful to the author's manuscript (but both editions had revisions from the original manuscript - even first editions are "revised and edited".). Tom Sawyer Abroad was serialized in a magazine and "bowdlerized" for that publication, and the American first edition used those plates to print the book. But if 20th century researchers had not discovered and published that fact, I might have used the British editions without knowing the circumstances or annotating the fact, and could have been accused of "revising the book" by readers familiar only with the Amercan edition (or vice versa, of course.)

I do believe that some of the changes a reader sees in Public Domain books are simply due to the text being based on a different edition than the one the reader is familiar with. I hope this possibility might be taken into consideration before accusing fingers are pointed.