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Agree totally.
As I lack ability with Old English, I have Chaucer's Canterbury tales in side by side. Best attempt at original text on one side and modern on the other.
Oddly if I read the old stuff (and Robbie Burns) out loud it makes more sense, perhaps because I'm from a Scottish / Irish part of "These Islands" originally. Tiring.
I can manage Shakespeare more easily, though I find it easier if someone else is reading it.
If you mean James Joyce's 'Ulysses', well it's experimental English with made up words. You could only break it by trying to fix it. I'd want a printed text even to fix OCR errors.
I think any serious republishing of old PD texts that are scanned and OCRed would have a proof reader with the printed edition and familiar with the author's works and English of the period.
I bought two collected works of Amazon Kindle that seemed to be simply stuff from archive.org (Google & MS OCR with no proof edit), waste of €2. Most of the Gutenberg and Fadedpage is OK for a free download, it's at least proofed by humans with the intent of only fixing typesetting & OCR errors. There are a lot of mega-collections on Amazon that seem to be just repackaged Gutenberg. Some with atrocious formatting. But I don't hold with re-writing PD, unless it's REALLY old and distributed clearly as a modern paraphrase, or obviously re-told as per Gaiman's "Norse Legends".
I'd not want to see Austen or any of the Brontës modernised and I think it's good the publisher reverted most of the changes to the Famous Five novels.
It's still weird though to read "classic" kids stories done before 1971 having decimal money. Obviously the publishers think kids are incapable of asking anyone what a Shilling is. I thought they still have history in schools.
UK Publishers leave USA texts as is. USA Publishers usually Americanize, but the author is still alive (e.g. J.K. Rowlings). American Publishers seem to think their readers are totally dumb. Hence Americans importing UK editions!
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