Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

teresaelsey.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#51

Post by NeoTar »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #9
freddie_mercury wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't understand why editors decided to rename Agatha Christie's 1939 book Ten Little Niggers in 1985? Or is that a "recent cultural trend" where you can understand why publishers followed the trend and made a change? Because once someone admits that change was okay, it's no longer a question of principles and just a series of judgment calls that different people will make differently. Publishers make chan…

> My daughters are Asian I wouldn't buy them a children's book where "be Chinese" is considered an acceptable Halloween costume. There also exist people who would rather avoid buying books where the publisher changed the content in 1984 style to appease the woke moaners.

There is a difference between consciously erasing the past in the 1984-novel style, and re-releasing an updated version of a book. The important thing being that the original texts are still available - we aren't seizing original editions from homes and burning them.

Admittedly that's actually a more complicated when it comes to electronic texts which may be automatically updated.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#52

Post by evilduck »

djoldman wrote: post #43
shagie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in college, I recall a professor saying that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Nietzsche in translation rather than as it was written. (Upon reflection, it might have been Kant - https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/28743 ) My latin was too rusty to be able to read Meditations on First Philosophy as it was written. ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306 ). A translation fro…

This isn't a problem. The translation is a new work. The original work in the original language stays frozen. Incidentally, the translation is treated the same and is frozen in the same manner.

Individual beliefs aside, the Christian Bible makes for a fascinating case study in book translations. Some translations are modern takes on an existing language translation like translating the King James Bible into modern English as literally as possible, while some take their own liberties with interpreting the original text as it was written and come up with somewhat dramatically different results. Translations between languages with dramatically different language syntax and grammars exists, as well as abridged snippets and (probably) millions of derivative texts used for lessons and teaching. And it's been going on for over a millennium, so we get perspectives on the cultures and languages themselves dramatically changing over time too.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#53

Post by dhosek »

djoldman wrote: post #29

> And sometimes we’re not sure if what we’re seeing even is an error. The following passage, from Philip K. Dick, displays a lot of creative use of language, but the “zommed” in the third line — while matching the print book — seems a bit suspect. Should it be “zoomed”? How can we know? Strictly for possible typos: if the author is alive, ask them, otherwise leave it. > Sometimes a book is completely accurate at the…

I’m reminded of the (canceled) edition of Salinger’s Hapworth 16, 1924 where Salinger insisted that the text be reproduced exactly as it was in The New Yorker including any typos that appeared there.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#54

Post by bombcar »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #6
alexey-salmin wrote: post #5

> And here is a lovely classic children’s book — from 1960 — that’s about two little girls, and a witch, who has a baby, and a spelling bee, an actual bee that spells things. And there’s a minor part of the story where the girls are putting on their Halloween costumes, and one is a witch, and the other is “a little Chinese girl … and she had makeup on her face.” > I think we agree at this point that a nationality is…

You really don't understand why editors decided to rename Agatha Christie's 1939 book Ten Little Niggers in 1985? Or is that a "recent cultural trend" where you can understand why publishers followed the trend and made a change? Because once someone admits that change was okay, it's no longer a question of principles and just a series of judgment calls that different people will make differently. Publishers make chan…

Sure, perhaps you rename the book, and maybe they even changed the word inside the book. The term is accidental (as far as I know) to the mystery and the story.

But removing nigger from Huckleberry Finn would greatly destroy the purpose and means of that work - someone has to make that decision and weigh it.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#55

Post by dhosek »

shagie wrote: post #35
djoldman wrote: post #29

> And sometimes we’re not sure if what we’re seeing even is an error. The following passage, from Philip K. Dick, displays a lot of creative use of language, but the “zommed” in the third line — while matching the print book — seems a bit suspect. Should it be “zoomed”? How can we know? Strictly for possible typos: if the author is alive, ask them, otherwise leave it. > Sometimes a book is completely accurate at the…

Back in college, I recall a professor saying that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Nietzsche in translation rather than as it was written. (Upon reflection, it might have been Kant - https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/28743 ) My latin was too rusty to be able to read Meditations on First Philosophy as it was written. ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306 ). A translation fro…

I’ve often wondered if Greeks were at a disadvantage in reading Homer since they would have the choice of reading either the essentially foreign original text or what would feel like a bowdlerization as a modernized text, while translations to other languages wouldn’t have that same negative association connected to them.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#56

Post by bombcar »

nervysnail wrote: post #47
b112 wrote: post #39

Before ebooks, a bunch of friends and I used to memorize the full contents of a book, each. We'd then destroy the books.

Were they radical political books? Erotica?

Statistically the most likely book is The Very Hungry Caterpillar which most children memorize and then destroy.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#57

Post by pessimizer »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #34
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want people to buy the book, the old name is a turn off whether the content is raciest or not. This depends on the audience. For some people it is a turn off to adopt the title to a woke zeitgeist.

Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in modern society. It is, if nothing else, convenient that I don't have to say one of the worst slurs in American English every time I discuss Agatha Christie's body of work. It's worth noting that, for that reason, the book was released as "And Then There Were None" in its first US edition in 1940; the use of th…

> Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in modern society.

As a black American, I'm forced to care about the efforts of people to retcon pervasive racism out of history, or relegate it to one-dimensional "bad guys." This will not save my children from racism, instead it will make them absolutely bewildered by the pervasive racism they will face, and make them blame themselves.

Rewriting crimes out of history does not help victims, it helps perpetrators.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#58

Post by alexey-salmin »

dhosek wrote: post #55
shagie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in college, I recall a professor saying that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Nietzsche in translation rather than as it was written. (Upon reflection, it might have been Kant - https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/28743 ) My latin was too rusty to be able to read Meditations on First Philosophy as it was written. ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306 ). A translation fro…

I’ve often wondered if Greeks were at a disadvantage in reading Homer since they would have the choice of reading either the essentially foreign original text or what would feel like a bowdlerization as a modernized text, while translations to other languages wouldn’t have that same negative association connected to them.

Funny thing is the original _text_ probably didn't even exist. Mainstream theory is that Iliad was a purely oral tradition at first and was written down (not written) a few decades or centuries later. The sack of Troy happened shortly before the Late Bronze Age Collapse which among other things destroyed the Greek writing system now known as the Linear Script B. The Greek Alphabet had only appeared 3 centuries later and the period in between is often referred as the "Greek Dark Ages", since there was no writing system for the Greek language at that time.

One way to see Iliad is as a bard's song about lost good time before the apocalypse -- when Greek cities were mighty, trade flourishing, armies big etc.

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#59

Post by pessimizer »

boesboes wrote: post #23
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My daughters are Asian I wouldn't buy them a children's book where "be Chinese" is considered an acceptable Halloween costume. There also exist people who would rather avoid buying books where the publisher changed the content in 1984 style to appease the woke moaners.

If only those people would read

The people who secretly rewrite literature do not take a vote from readers before they do it. They "know better." They'll tell you that it's really just administrative, they're "updating the language."

Re: When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)

#60

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #6
alexey-salmin wrote: post #5

> And here is a lovely classic children’s book — from 1960 — that’s about two little girls, and a witch, who has a baby, and a spelling bee, an actual bee that spells things. And there’s a minor part of the story where the girls are putting on their Halloween costumes, and one is a witch, and the other is “a little Chinese girl … and she had makeup on her face.” > I think we agree at this point that a nationality is…

You really don't understand why editors decided to rename Agatha Christie's 1939 book Ten Little Niggers in 1985? Or is that a "recent cultural trend" where you can understand why publishers followed the trend and made a change? Because once someone admits that change was okay, it's no longer a question of principles and just a series of judgment calls that different people will make differently. Publishers make chan…

[dead]
Post reply on HN