[hildea]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Absolutely not. The main reason for republishing old books is for them to be available as an ebook to preserve them from going out of print ever again. It is not a lazy way of an author to rake money in again without doing any of the real work of writing. A simple edit will do.

You don't like that it is exactly political correctness and the term doesn't do it justice? Then call it by the real name. It is the equivalent of fake news with the malicious intent of rewriting history to make yourself paint in a saintly and innocent light by today's standards.

Hm, rereading this, it seems that you are criticising Davis (quite harshly, at that) for issuing a new edition of her book, after changing those few things that readers she spoke with found offensive?

I think that's unfair. If she tried to pretend that this was the only edition, and remove all knowledge of the first version, it would be dishonest (and probably impossible). But openly making a new edition in this case is, in my opinon, completely OK.

I've read one book which was the author's first novel, and in the first version the end was a bit clumsy and hurried. She published a new version some time later, where the ending was rewritten -- nothing substantial had changed in the plot or the events, but the writing and pacing was better. Do you see that, too, as "the equivalent of fake news"?

Going forward, by that logic, you will edit every historical book in existence to remove all offending material. You will be no better than a holocaust denier. You will freewilly do the book burnings that did happen not too long ago. If they had the technology back then to simply edit an old version of politically offending books with a new and clean ebook version, they would have done so. Everything they didn't burn, but created new, was propaganda.

If we don't stop this political correctness crap, history will repeat itself.

Here, you seem to be tilting at windmills. Who has advocated rewriting any historical book to remove all offending material? Noone in this thread, as far as I can see. (Sure, it has happened a few times, I mentioned some examples in the Politics and Religion thread about this), but it's pretty rare, and mostly seem to be done when small changes are assumed to improve the publisher's profits, like the retitling of Christie's "Ten Little N-".)