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Since I'm not english nor have english as my mother tongue, I should probably keep my head down, but I have to agree with OP and Jellby: modernising the orthography and correcting obvious mistakes must be allowed. (After all this is what I've done for nearly 20 years now, and making no secret of it. But then I haven't uploaded anything to Mobileread's library – yet.)
We have had various orthographic reforms over the last hundred years here in Denmark, and each time it happens, then the publishers (of pbooks, anyway) reprint old books with new orthography and usually also correct a few of the earlier editions' printer's errors. But now, in the age of ebooks, this practice is suddenly illegal? There are, of course, authors, whose orthography and strange wording is "part of the experience", so to speak - we have quite a few here, e.g. Mogens Klitgaard and Herman Bang – and in those instances the editor/publisher should step down and leave things as they are. But then again, even Joyce's Ulysses, which was mentioned in a previous post, exists in various "corrected and annotated" editions.
I see it as a way of making the old books readable and enjoyable for modern, not necessarily academic readers (and I admit we have more obstacles here in Denmark, what with old editions printed in blackletter/fraktur, old spelling practises and so on - english seems to be a more stable animal than danish), and sometimes it feels more like translating than transcribing - which leads me to this question: If you transcribe, say, an 1850 translation of Balzac and make an epub of it, you should (according to some of the posters here) keep the old orthography right down to the last comma and spelling error, but: if you translate the same Balzac novel in 2019, would you try to emulate the orthography of your language, as it were in 1850 (even if you knew it in the necessary details)? I think not …
As usual, just my two-pennies/cents worth.
Regards, Kim
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