Music (used to?) do something like this. One version for Al Gore’s PMRC and one version for everyone else.
So long as the original is also available, why not?
In the case of deceased authors, ensuring your work is treated the way you want is why you put a literary executor in your will. In the absence of direct instructions, the literary executor gets to decide, and it's not relevant if there's no mention of changes in the will.
I have published books. They'll likely never be worth anything. But the absence of any terms about them in my will is intentional: Once I'm gone, I don't give a shit what my inheritors do with the rights for them. That's their business.
As for authenticity, the originals still exist. Nothing has erased them. Deposit laws means the original editions will be on file at relevant libraries even if every customer got rid of theirs. I'm all for ensuring original editions remain at least somehow accessible, but this obsession with changes to books now just strikes me as comical given how long abridged, simplified or simply reimagined versions of classics have existed.
Though chances are good that what you've read and consider "authentic" wasn't the original anyway, but one of the earlier revised editions. E.g. the version most people will have read was revised to change the Oompa-Loompas from African pygmies.
Any alteration to his work after his death is no longer his work.
I should add: that may or may not be important to someone. To me it is. I don’t consider the altered version his work any longer but rather a derivative work or more accurately, a vandalization of his work.
I may be simple-minded but I would have thought that people either want to read a book or they don't. But now is there really a market for people who want to read a book but only if that book's content is made different from what it actually is? (I'm worried if that's the case).
On the other hand, I fully understand that the aim of a publisher is to sell more.
But what the publisher did in this case was not like that; these modifications weren't designed to make the books more accessible to people with low reading skill ('fat' is not a hard word.)
People have been willing to pay for this kind of thing for a long time.
It's a little different now in that it's the original rights-holder doing it but money talks and why argue over fair use when you can do it yourself?
Tipper Gore.
You're making the assumption that rightsholders will continue to publish or allow others to publish the old edition. Maybe this time when it becomes a big deal in a news cycle, but the next time it happens, it won't be as big a deal. The tenth time it happens, nobody will know or care:
"Old news. Fascists trying to make a big deal out of something that happens every day. You didn't see them crying when they censored all of the atheist books, so why are they crying now when we're censoring all the Nazis? This is just foreign propaganda trying to exaggerate the differences between us, most normal people are united in their support of The Homeland against Eastern Mind Control." --comment on RedditHN circa 2035.
The thing that alarms me most is that these are people censoring extremely successful masterworks from revered authors. The stuff being written today, by nobody-yets, is being pre-corrected.