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Actually, I think it's not OK to have 'sanitised' versions. No-one is forced to read a book but if you do you 'confront' the content. Sanitising everything, as seems to be the trend, is cowardly and weakening minds.

On the other hand, I fully understand that the aim of a publisher is to sell more.

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The most common form of "sanitation" is probably abridgement, and I think there is a strong argument that abridgement is a net positive because it allows people who would never be able/willing to read the full book to get the gist of the story and still participate in / understand at least some of the cultural significance of that story. Not terribly unlike reasonably faithful film adaptations.

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.)

Abridgement is not 'sanitising'.

It can be. Is there an abridgement of The Count of Monte Cristo that has the hashish chapter? The abridgement I read as a kid didn't have it.

Maybe, but another alternative is that (mass-market) authors feel compelled to only write bowdlerized versions of what they had in mind to write and then you're left with fewer options.

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