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by p1itopre 2491 days ago
There is indeed a problem that the article describes: book pirates with very little oversight selling books on Amazon and making a profit for both. A result of this practice is that people get substandard copies of books with typos.

The headline suggests that these typos are sinister ("newspeak"). If that were true, that would be an entirely different and also disturbing problem. I did not find any mention of these errors to be so.

2 comments

I think the disturbing problem lies in the proliferation of sources of misinformation, not in the motivations of said sources. We live in an age where information distribution is so cheap and convenient that everyone has ended up bombarded by noise, and few have the time and education or luxury to sift through it all. In the end, maybe Orwell was wrong about the source of the corruption of society: it's not controlled by an oligarchy or big brother; it's an epiphenomenon of a burgeoning, hyperconnected, disorganized collective.
Implying, so far, all that's lacking is the motivation to create sinister disinformation, not the means.. which this article demonstrates now exist.