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Originally Posted by Slipkid
Looks like Ian Fleming is also getting the treatment now.
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Ugh. Well, my set of James Bond 007 ebooks were purchased back in 2012 and long since downloaded, DRM removed, and backed up.
Where the heck does this end? Why can't people just accept that books were written in different time frames, become dated, and need to be read with that in mind?
Mind you, if a change was made to an ebook to improve accessibility, I don't have a real problem with that. Maybe an old book used something like "blood-stream" and if that is modernized to "bloodstream" to improve dictionary lookup, I wouldn't quibble.
Or, if a book had a lot of mixed use of words like "sage brush" and "sagebrush," I might chalk it up to having the print justification done during a non-digital era and would have no qualms if one use was chosen to improve consistency. Because multiple spellings in a single book tend to grate on me.
I could even support an Oxford comma being added as necessary to improve clarity or better TTS phrasing. Or an apostrophe to replace a missing letter. Those kinds of changes feel relatively harmless, and yet can improve the experience for users.
But rewriting the author's words, including possibly removing some, seems SO wrong! I would like to see all publishers, if they opt to do this sort of thing, make it very clear that a book has been altered.
When it happens with well-known authors, it's news, but think of what is probably happening to lesser authors, where it's likely being done without any fanfare?