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Comment on Amazon is changing what is written in books

Tea_and_oranges@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

The man who made that video is annoying. The story he read out was from the twits by Roald dahl, it was a few years back that those changes were made. Dahl was a great author but wasn’t a very pc person , his family have had to apologise for his anti semitism. So whoever is in charge of his works wanted to make them more modern and less insulting which misses the point of Dahl but anyway. They’ve done it with Enid blyton books too. In one of hers they have a dog called the n word so probably more necessary with her work lol.

All amazon have done is update the digital edition to the match the latest edition. There’s a million things to hate Amazon for you don’t have to make things up. And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book, you own them and they don’t run out of electricity.

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AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
That’s still not OK

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- Nalivai@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Printing new editions of a book was always a thing
  
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  - AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Forcibly destroying all previous editions is not however
    
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  - 5too@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Quietly swapping your earlier edition with the current edition was not, however.
    
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- balder1991@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Doing it silently without consent is definitely not okay. Or if they do such a thing, they should notify the user and give an option to rollback if they wanted.
  
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- iamdefinitelyoverthirteen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Yeah, I’m with you on this one.
  
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kava@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book

The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don’t connect devices to the internet that don’t need to be connected to the internet.

The “internet of things” that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.

I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.

Like, it’s objectively better than a book.

But it doesn’t need to be connected to the internet.

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- AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Agreed. And alternatives exist, like Kobo
  
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stardust@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Changing words seems wrong with it sanitizing and makes future audiences unaware of how bigoted and flawed writers of a time period might be. It underplays cruel parts of society leading to a flawed rosy colored outlook. Now future readers won’t know how far from PC writers like Dahl were.

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FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Dahl was a great author but wasn’t a very pc person , his family have had to apologise for his anti semitism.

That is putting it very mildly.

"There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

He said that in *checks notes* 1971.

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- AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Oof
  
  He’d probably like today’s politics, it seems fashionable to just lean into anything bad someone says about you.
  
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solrize@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Wait, if you have the old edition on your kindle, do they reach into your kindle and change what is there? Or do they just change the version in the store to the new edition, preferably with a new ISBN, if Kindles have ISBN’s?

I remember about the Roald Dahl thing and it seemed pretty clear which edition people would be getting. And some of this stuff (according to another internet poster I mean) may have been intended to keep the books in copyright longer rather than to merely mess with the content. Blyton died in 1968 so her stuff could enter the public domain in the next few decades otherwise. That’s nefarious too.

I remember for sure that Huckleberry Finn had the N word. Maybe little kids shouldn’t be reading it, I’m cool with that, though I read it as a kid myself. But grown-ups who do read it can deal with an unexpurgated version.

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Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’m not saying you should call anyone a removed but you americans sure have some strange problems with words if you can’t even put it in writing.

Should we censor words like Nazi, Hitler, Accident, Hate, Rape, and so on? Who decides the approved words? How do you even transcribe events correctly?

It’s like peopke think that there is nothing bad done if we just don’t talk about it.

Smh

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