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by everforward 666 days ago
> No. A book should capture an author's intent/concept/idea at the time it was written and those intents/concepts/ideas should be frozen.

Given that we're talking about ebooks, whose readers generally have some kind of navigation system, I think it would be reasonable to include a footnote. If a book says Pluto is a planet, I wouldn't mind a [1] linking to a note that says "Pluto has not been considered a planet since $year. $LinkToWikipedia".

I agree that actually changing the content is a bad idea, but I do think it would be valuable to link to up-to-date information in a non-intrusive manner.

1 comments

That, too, would constitute a new edition if the updates went into the work itself. Otherwise, the previous work is still a thing—you're just pretending that it's not and the new thing was the thing all along. That's harmful and dangerous and unnecessary.

What you want doesn't necessitate changes to anything except maybe the reader software. Annotation and commentary has been around for millennia. What you want is for the reader to inline the commentary. That's fine.