Comment by idoubtit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idoubtit | Hacker News Reader

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I respect this choice of modernization, and I suppose some readers enjoy it, but it makes the publisher's whole work useless to me. When a text has been altered, I can't trust it respects the intent of the author, and any style inconsistency I find may be a by-product of the publisher's mangling.

So, when I care about a book, I never read Standard Ebooks' edition.

By the way, the modernization is more than joining a few words. Sometimes, Standard Ebooks replaces the word used at the time the book was written. For instance:

    This time, however, the mountain was going to [-Mahomet;-]{+Muhammad;+}

The previous quote is from Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga". The author used many French words and French spellings – like "Tchekov" for the Russian playwriter that was living in Paris. These subtleties are lost with the modernization.

I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:

    if she wanted a good book she should read [-“Job”-]{+Job+};
    his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.

Anyone who has read books for classes in high school and above knows that even classics are routinely fucked with by publishers. Even early in the work's history. I remember even in middle school someone would invariably end up with a different publisher's edition of a book for summer reading or whatnot and we'd find changes.

Unless the book is specifically declared to be the original text - and it may have to specify which original text - they're going to be edited.

However, in electronic form it should be possible to include both in one file, or two files with the original in a repo branch once all the document structure stuff has been added. That text will never change, so merging formatting-only changes should be pretty painless.

For every book, Standard Ebooks provides a hyperlink to the original scan, a hyperlink to the original transcription, and a full revision history in which all spelling updates have been clearly marked. To me, this already seems to be going above and beyond—most ebook repositories provide less. I can’t imagine that the marginal benefit from keeping multiple parallel branches would be worth the cost in volunteer time and labor, when maintaining pristine first editions isn’t even a goal of the project.

And of course, none of this matters in the slightest for translated works, which almost by definition includes the vast majority of works ever written.

"As it was written" is a very high bar that is simply not attainable for anything other than fairly recent works in your native language.

> I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:

That one appears to not be a mistake, [0] suggests that not quoting the name of the book of the bible being referred to (so [Job] rather than ["Job"]) is the style accepted by Chicago, MLA, and APA.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_citation#Common_formats

I respect their choice too, but like you the reason for my question was that I feel I can't trust the end product. Alex said "We only make sound-alike changes, like to-morrow -> tomorrow", which I could just about get along with, but Mahomet -> Muhammad creates an entirely different flavour for me. As Alex said, that's fine, in that it doesn't mean the other editions aren't available, but it is a shame for me when I essentially don't want to use something that has been put together so painstakingly.

I'm disappointed to learn of this editing in Standard Ebooks, having had the misfortune to buy a Barnes & Noble copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes that had a similar approach taken. Book looks lovely, but has an altered chapter order, Americanised spellings and lots of typos. There is a certain amount of editing needed to render the likes of Shakespeare and Samuel Pepys readable, as Middle/Old English is quite a different language, but slight variants from 150ish years ago, or dialects, or the correct spelling according to the Queen's English, add flavour and should not be altered.

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