4 ms·
As someone who regularly compares different scans of old books, I counter: for centuries it’s already been common practice for publishers to update spellings, r
by bentley 3y ago
As someone who regularly compares different scans of old books, I counter: for centuries it’s already been common practice for publishers to update spellings, recapitalize, and even make more drastic changes. You just never noticed because print books don’t have a public commit log.
In the case of Standard Ebooks, “sound‐alike” changes are allowed (so spelling and capitalization changes are allowed when they make sense). Censorship, and even innocuous grammatical changes, are not. Despite generally appreciating old works in their own context, I find the tradeoff in readability for such a widespread practice to be worth it given how minor SE’s alterations are.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThe problem is when irregular spelling is intended to capture a vernacular. It does a disservice to everyone, erasing the author's intent with homogenized language.
- bentley 3y agoIf the spelling is intended to be vernacular, the SE policy is not to change the spelling. I (a mere reader) have successfully reverted dialectal spellings in SE several times.
- chrismorgan 3y agoSometimes capitalisation matters are close to purely stylistic, but other times they really are part of the content, guiding pronunciation or emphasis, so that lowercasing them harms the work. What is your opinion of my assessment in the above comment of some of the specific changes in <https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christmas-carol/commit/c71276a8449e4c3f572cd7134ba20290dd57cfd8 https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma...>?
- bentley 3y agoI haven’t looked into your example, but certainly it can be true that lowercasing can be harmful. It goes without saying, I think, that the SE policy is only to lowercase words when doing so doesn’t harm. When I see erroneous changes in SE books, I argue to revert, and have generally been successful. In my experience it’s drama‐free, like fixing any other typo.