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Comment by arooaroo | Hacker News Reader

A couple of things jump out:

1. Dahl had already made changes to the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The early editions had African pygmies as his free labour. I don’t think the world was “woke” back then.

2. This is being done by a corporate publishing house in order to maximise the revenue of one of its key IP assets. It’s not mandated by government/regulation; there is no viral social media furore or press campaign. It’s not censorship nor anything like 1984 where works are being revised and all traces of the previous version cease to exist.

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> like 1984 where works are being revised and all traces of the previous version cease to exist.

in our e-book future that's simply not the case; older editions or 'per-correction' editions are hard to find, and often-times impossible without resorting to pirate channels.

This type of thing is already happening, but it's not raising red-flags for people because it's not being done in an overtly malicious way as in '1984', it's being normalized via things like electronic-only distribution of media, and it's being explained and OK'd via 'corporate revenue' as an excuse -- but what's really happening is that older media is being thrown away at an alarming rate, and not only for the sake of correctness or moral balancing.

Regarding 2 - I think we need to regard these things with a holistic eye on centralization in general, rather than narrowly focusing on government / not government. True, government didn't order the change - however, government does forbid acquiring a copy from anyone except this single entity, through copyright law. The practical effect is the same - a small and unelected entity gets to unilaterally fiddle with shared culture, and I can't legally obtain or distribute an unmolested copy. That's censorship.

Really, the core issue is copyright law again. There comes a point where something is so enmeshed in our culture that it can't be said to be "owned" by anyone anymore.

1. The author changing his own work is in no way comparable to posthumously changing an author’s work.

2. How is this material?

You don’t know the motivations of the people making this change, and there’s no evidence that editing via “sensitivity readers” actually increases revenue.

There is, however, plenty of evidence of the ideological basis for these types of actions.

As for censorship ala 1984? The previous version will no longer be sold and will gradually disappear, and for new readers, the previous version will have effectively ceased to exist.

Never mind the potential automatic updating of ebooks.

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