I was thumbing through an old issue of Wired and came across an interesting article on the mutability of e-books.
I'm not on the e-book bandwagon just yet. To be honest, I'm barely on the p-book bandwagon -- I probably average about three books a year. (I like to say that it's because I'm an editor and I read enough for my day job, but I think it's really just laziness.)
When I do read for entertainment, nothing can diminish my experience more than lousy proofreading. Sure, any first edition is going to have a typo or two. But sometimes the errors are so egregious and many, especially in books with a niche audience, that the whole thing is kinda ruined or me.
But with e-books, such errors can be fixed immediately by the publisher, with a new version available for download the same day. Gone is the time first and second editions. Now it's more like editions 1.0 and 1.1.
The Wired article also points out the slippery-slope nature of on-demand edits. What's to stop an author from retconning his work if he comes up with a better ending six months down the line? There's something definitive about an ink-and-paper edition that's lost in digitization. But such philosophical questions aside, if e-books allow me to read a first edition without fear of the copyeditor cringe, I'm all for 'em.
I never even thought about the fact that authors could potentially change the endings to their e-books. It's very interesting to think about. Personally, I don't think I'll be hopping on the e-book train anytime soon. There's something about physically turning the pages of the books that I don't want to do away with!
ReplyDeletewow, I didn't know about the editing factor of e-books either. For me, it's definitely one more strike in the "cons" column. The first edition should be the first edition. Putting it through edits after it has been released to the public is like a musician releasing an album and then re-mixing tracks that they're still not happy with after it has been released. Not cool. Re-mix albums are lame and so are re-written books.
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