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I think there are standards for how significant the amount of material has to be in order to qualify for copyright. I don't know if they are written in black and white anywhere in copyright law, or if it's more of a judgement call by a court. A single word isn't a copyrightable creative work, nor is something like a list of names/instructions, etc.
I would think that correcting errors or minor editing (changing a word here and there) would not constitute a creative work subject to copyright protection. However, writing a multi-page forward or analysis (which sounds like what B&N is doing) should qualify. But the copyright would only cover the added material, they don't gain copyright protection for the entire public domain work.
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