Amazon Kindle books sometimes receive ebook updates that the publisher or author pushes out. The Amazon Kindle e-reader has a reporting feature in digital books for spelling mistakes that are automatically sent over and often revised. The ebook cover art will be updated to generate interest when a book is made into a movie. An example of this is Andy Weir’s The Martian; the old book was orange and had an image of an astronaut, but the updated one has a massive face of actor Matt Damon. Amazon is not the only company to update ebooks; Google Play and Kobo do it too. With all the most recent examples of books being updated for politically correct content, ebooks need a public changelog to chronicle all the content that has been changed. Software, tablet and iPhone apps all have a public changelog, so why not books?
There have been serious debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of famous 20th-century authors. In the book “Matilda,” a reference to Joseph Conrad disappears. Owners of Stine’s “Goosebumps” books lost mentions of schoolgirls’ “crushes” on a headmaster and a description of an overweight character with “at least six chins.” Racial and ethnic slurs were snipped out of Christie’s mysteries.
Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their ebooks automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.” Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated their ebooks, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs. Twit as fearfully ugly. Dahl’s biographer Matthew Dennison accused the publisher of “strong-arming readers into accepting a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.”
Automatic ebook updates are one thing, but for the upcoming 70th anniversary of James Bond, the original Ian Fleming novels will be re-released this April, but with unwelcome changes to the original text to adhere to today’s “woke” sensibilities. There will also be trigger warnings at the beginning, warning readers of each book’s contents. “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace,” the disclaimer will read. References to the race and ethnicity of characters appear to have borne the brunt of the changes, with the use of terms deemed offensive or antiquated said to have been axed in favour of descriptors more befitting of modern progressive tastes. A strip tease at a nightclub acting “like pigs at the trough” in Live and Let Die being axed. The novels, from Casino Royale to Octopussy, will have rewrites to remove racial references and sexual content.
Terry Adams, a vice president who runs paperback and digital publishing at Little, Brown and Company, whose authors include James Patterson, Evelyn Waugh and Donna Tartt, said the company regularly makes “corrections” to e-books at editors’ and authors’ discretion, fixing factual errors and typos, rewording phrases and adding new passages, among other changes. Adams said these edits are typically not recorded publicly, in line with industry standards.
Amazon Kindle users can turn off automatic updates in their Amazon preferences. In a statement, a company spokeswoman said, “Publishers control the copyright for the books they publish and so control the content and updating of their Kindle books.” Google Play and Kobo do not have an opt-out feature for automatic ebook updates.
I think for total transparency; there need to be mechanisms in place for Amazon, Rakuten Kobo and Google Play Books to have a new field where ebooks that have been updated now or in the future have a field for authors and publishers to enter data in the form of a changelog. This changelog will be placed on the book’s description page. It would clarify things for users so they know what has been updated regarding cover art, text, or spelling mistakes. Ronald Dahls’s books were heavily altered because of the news media. How many books are changed to be PC after the fact that gets no press? This is where a changelog would be beneficial.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.