[HalfRadish]

This captures a new problem that's sort of sneaked in with the advent of digital publishing.

In a print book, you can make corrections or revisions in a new edition, but the old edition is still potentially out there, in libraries and private collections, preserving its own history.

In a digital publication, if you make a revision, the old edition disappears by default; older versions are only preserved if someone does so deliberately.

At the very least, the reader should be informed of the initial publication date as well as the dates of any revisions, which I believe is already standard practice in the print world. This is essential context for the reader.

When a text revised in 2024 purports to be [entirely] from 1948: bad. When a revised text mostly written in 1948 purports to be [entirely] from 2024: also bad. To me, this is way more important than the question of whether or not to make revisions per se.

[NeoTar]

But an advantage of digital texts could be that you buy a text in 2024, and it shows you all revisions of the text from 1948 to 2024…

[alexey-salmin]

Well somehow that's the opposite of what happened when Roald Dahl books were updated for political correctness.

"Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle."

https://archive.ph/20230302163549/https://www.thetimes.co.uk...