Liberated? That ephemera might actually be integral to the story and you are NOT the arbiters of intent. Please keep your modernizing out of my lit'ratur.
[1]Pap, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Personally, I would like to see our storage formats move towards more dynamic documents, so that the reader can literally flip between the original content and the "modernized" variation. Ebook readers already have integrated dictionaries, why not the discussions and interpretations integrated too? (I ask in a partially rhetorical sense; is fighting the inevitable changing of language really gaining anybody anything? Is it not possible that that "problem" is a red herring?)
I can imagine a "Do-Gooder" helpfully going through Huck Finn and modernizing all that messy vernacular but that book ain't Mark Twain's and it ain't something I'd want to read. Some folks may have trouble understanding what is being said but modernizing the text would suck the life right out of the story.
To your point, I think the ultimate prize is both the original and a modern/translated digital version. Anecdotally, I might have developed an appreciation of Shakespeare MUCH earlier in life had I known not just what the characters were saying but combined with how they were saying it.
You needn't imagine it; it's happened, more than once. For example: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html?pagewant...
Think of it more like modernizing spelling of Shakespeare, so that we can enjoy the text and not spend time parsing spelling like:
Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame,
A blisse in proofe and provd and very wo,
Before a joy proposd behind a dreame...
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring barque,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
O no, it is an euer fixed marke
That lookes on tempeſts and is neuer ſhaken;
It is the ſtar to euery wandring barke
Whoſe worths vnknowne, although his higth be taken...
In that example, "vnknowne" is pronounced the same as "unknown", despite having an extra "vowel" in the typography.
A mechanical modernization and standardization would seem to run a significant risk of damaging some of these, though proper manual final review would hopefully catch and revert the problematic cases.
How many syllables are in the word 'wandring'? How many are in the word 'wandering'?
Sadly, the modernization breaks the meter and it's no longer a sonnet. I have a sneaky suspicion The Bard was deliberate in his choice of spelling...
I say this because I have never in my life been rendered so furious by the action of a literary editor as to have Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle completely ruined for me by some importunate jackass who insisted upon putting a long, discursive deconstruction of the entire novel into a preface of an edition I incautiously happened to choose. By the time I realized what I was reading, it was too late, and I found myself unable to appreciate the actual story at all, having had it helpfully predigested for me by this ham-handed oaf who so highly valued his unique and precious insight into what Jackson was really trying to say that he put it first in the book, where it lay in the path of the not perfectly cautious reader as a beartrap in that of a cheerful weekend rambler.
I should like any such initiative as that you describe to take as axiomatic it's worth not doing that kind of thing, is what I'm trying to get across here.
As someone who grew up in Hannibal, Missouri where Sam Clemens did, let me tell ya it's still a tad diff'rent from N'York.
If someone intends to "modernize" a book, particularly the dialog, they need to make it clear that it is a translation from one dialect of the language to another. They need to not credit the author those new words and say they just fixed typography. There needs to be an "as interpreted by", and that person needs the blame by name.
Try thinking about this visually. If I modernize ANYTHING on the Mona Lisa, whose work is it? Are my brushstrokes over his really not changing anything fundamental about the work or is it just another option for viewing Leo's most famous portrait?