Tolstoy’s Been Nookd!
by wjw on June 15, 2012
‘In one of the truly bizarre incidents we’ve seen out of the e-book publishing world, a translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace for Barnes & Noble’s Nook platform has replaced all mentions of the word “kindled” with “Nookd.”‘
I actually doubt Barnes & Noble is responsible for this, and I’m inclined to suspect the publisher and an overzealous use of Find and Replace.
Yet it reminds me of the German edition of Hardwired, where the text had been altered to feature a paid advertisement for Maggi condensed soups.
Etexts are, of course, much more vulnerable to this sort of thing— be it from advertisers, anarchists, mashup artists, and people who just want to make the book better . . . by their lights. Not to mention Mrs. Grundy and her blue pencil, as was evidenced by a recent electronic edition of Huckleberry Finn.
I like my electronic editions because I’m responsible for everything, including the mistakes. They’re definitive editions, as far as I’m concerned.
But of course all I’ve done is provided fodder for mashups and travesty. Let’s hope that whoever goes after my text actually has talent.
Previous post: Gopher Tuna
Next post: Virtual Tee
If one is going to be brutal and perform a global find-and-replace, one might at least employ a regular expression:
/\bKindle\b/Nook/g
…though that won’t preserve sentences starting with the verb. So the results should be manually checked in a diff viewer- which is second nature when one is using version control; one is using version control, yes?
But of course this is esoteric to a non-programmer, and the text is probably in some binary Word file rather than the more transparent ASCII. And none of this is going to help the text when someone intends to insert paid advertisements.
Yet it reminds me of the German edition of Hardwired, where the text had been altered to feature a paid advertisement for Maggi condensed soups.
Please, more details.
The people demand it!
Comments on this entry are closed.