vaikrunta OP t1_jaw1ydw wrote
Reply to comment by MamaMiaPizzaFina in Banning Words Won’t Make the World More Just - The Atlantic by vaikrunta
If what you claim about publishers want to sell is true, Its profiteering. It's not like they are sitting on the huge inventory that they can't do away with and it's costing them to hold on to that inventory (even if they did, old inventory without changes means nothing to them).
They have rights, they could always print and sell with a positive preface saying, look which ideas were normal when the book was first published in the year xyz and see how far we have come etc. With the controversial content, arguably, the books would sell more.
If anyone changes a book content without the explicit permission of author (if he or she is dead, then no permission by default) then they should not sell that stuff in author's name. It should be that simple. They can repackge it and call it a sanitized version of xyz by abc and then see how many people want to read that. (There could still be a pull for this, I am thinking Stephen Fry telling us about Mythos, that's essentially retelling, publishers need to have guts to do that rather than tampering already existing works of other authors)
MamaMiaPizzaFina t1_jawt4sx wrote
publishers cannot have guts, it is just a corporation with a marketing team and executives.
If a book is edited then they have no right to sell it without putting it in big letters in the title. the same wat that when a book is translated, the translator name should be stated. it should be obvious that the translated work is not the original.
You are right, the best option to publish things that have aged poorly (or just perceived to have aged poorly) is to include a preface.
"This book was written in ___, some behaviours and attitudes present in this book are unacceptable now but were considered normal then. they are not a reflection of peepeepoopoo publishing, but are presented in it's original form here as the author wrote it."
Otherwise it is sugar coating history.
But a book that is old enought to have "aged" should be in the public domain, this life + 70 years is utter BS.
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