I've been trying to think of the least offensive way to approach this issue since first reading the protracted squabble that closed the original thread despite persistent and tactful warnings by a moderator.
Rather than "strongly suggesting" that uploaders not change the original text (whatever that means given the variants and vicissitudes between innumerable editions), wouldn't it be better to adopt a badge or phrase that book creators could add to their upload posts if they were proud of not having altered a single word? It could even be a facetious phrase: "Team Literal" or "NWTQTI" (no word too questionable to include).
Adherence to a higher personal standard should be at the discretion of the uploader, not the insistence of the admins on a policy that couldn't be enforced unless mods were expected to sacrifice yet more of their compromised free time by comparing every word of every book in the MR library to its physical source.
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One point that I have yet to see anyone mention:
MR's free editions are often more faithful to the original text than their commercial counterparts.
The thing that first brought me to Mobile Read was the quality of the uploaded books
as opposed to those on Kobo and Amazon. Small commercial book creators regularly modify books by writers like Dickens and Melville, even billing their modifications as features. Larger publishers are not always that much better. Often, they apply spell checks and global changes automatically and not conditionally.
I still remember the joy and disappointment I felt downloading a copy of
Moby Dick from Amazon on the day I bought my first e-reader. The novel was filled with homophones, breathtaking typos and unapplied formatting. One edition of Moncrieff's Proust was larded with advertisements from the book creator -- in prominent and distracting places -- throughout their nigh-unreadable Gutenberg regurgitation.
Then I discovered MR and found a community not only of trouble-shooters and users but also painstaking e-book creators.
Absolutely anyone can create and sell editions of public domain books based on Gutenberg scans; lots of people do. What I first noticed about MR's free books was that the level of care applied to Gutenberg scans -- formatting, proofreading, etc. -- was significantly higher than it tends to be for editions offered on commercial sites. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the editions offered in MR got recast slightly and sold on Kobo and Amazon. If so, then the stolen editions might comprise some of the better commercial options.
Perhaps the abundance of programmers on MR is part of the reason for the library's excellence, but what can't be discounted are the qualities one doesn't often find when surveying repackaged classic texts: inspiration, creativity, diligence and ennobling generosity. What we lost with the closing of the Dover Bookstore in New York we regained in part with the opening of the Mobile Read Library.