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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

We do: money.

The publishing company holds the copyrights, they make a lot of money from Roald Dahl, but they're worried about the long term prospects for that revenue stream due to social change. Maybe they have additional feedback from retail buyers or customers. They decided to take an approach of retooling their product to fit with changing mores, and either went too far or made a poor PR job of releasing the information.

As far as I know, nobody asked for this. It's fairly well known (at least in the UK) that Dahl harbored many prejudices typical of his generation and demographics, and himself watered down some of them to make his books more salable, eg the original Oompa-Loompas were modeled on African pygmies.

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> The publishing company holds the copyrights, they make a lot of money from Roald Dahl, but they're worried about the long term prospects for that revenue stream due to social change.

If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion? They were clearly listening to a handful of fringe nuts and didn't actually have their finger on the pulse of the mainstream zeitgeist.

They have now realized their error and are trying to backtrack from it.

Why does any company's product launch fail? Arrogance, intellectual laziness, chasing a trend off a cliff. Same way company owners sometimes check out and hand over the reins to management consultants.

I am not privy to their sales data; perhaps it looks terrible and they panicked. While there has been a big backlash, I don't think adult nostalgia is as profitable as childhood enthusiasm; parents might buy Roald Dahl for their kids, but there are plenty of other authors competing for their attention.

So you're evidently privy to the company's reasoning when it comes to the initial decision to censor the books, but when it comes to the backtrack you just don't know. Got it.

I didn't express any view on the backtrack. It's very obvious they realized the move was unpopular and wanted to mollify their customers. As I mentioned above, nobody asked them to do this in the first place.

You seem to be projecting some idea of your own onto me.

Possibly.

Or they're capitalizing on the backlash by offering both options, with the added benefit that they'll get to A/B test what direction the market wants them to go.

And now there are two versions, a lot of publicity and people here in these threads recommending people buy it.

> If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion?

Hey, if that's what you want to believe...

So far nothing bad has happened to them; they got a lot of press coverage and only made loud fringe people upset.

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