From the New York Times news section:
It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it
Recent automatic updates to e-book editions of works by Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie are a reminder of who really owns your digital media.
By Reggie Ugwu
April 4, 2023Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors—including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie—is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as if made by a book thief in the night: quietly and with no clear evidence of a disturbance.
In Britain, Clarissa Aykroyd, a Kindle reader of Dahl’s “Matilda,” watched a reference to Joseph Conrad disappear. (U.S. editions of Dahl’s books were unaffected.) …
In each case, e-books that had been published and sold in one form were retroactively (and irrevocably) altered, highlighting what consumer rights experts say is a convention of digital publishing that customers may never notice or realize they signed up for. Buying an e-book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours.
… “They make it feel similar to buying a physical book, but in reality it’s 180 degrees different,” he added.
… But publishers can issue updates for any reason and generally don’t identify or explain revisions. The edits to Stine’s and Christie’s novels came to wide attention only when they were reported this month by The Times of London and The Telegraph, years after having been pushed out to readers.
… Users can turn off automatic updates in their Amazon preferences. …
Google Play automatically updates e-books with no option to opt out. …
Terry Adams, a vice president who runs paperback and digital publishing at Little, Brown and Company, whose authors include James Patterson, Evelyn Waugh and Donna Tartt, said the company regularly makes “corrections” to e-books at editors’ and authors’ discretion, fixing factual errors and typos, rewording phrases and adding new passages, among other changes. These edits are typically not recorded publicly, Adams said, in line with industry standards.
I could at least see an argument for allowing Donna Tartt, who is a living author, to alter her books on your device (not that there’s any evidence she wants to). But I would think that Little, Brown would want to issue a statement saying they will never, ever alter your Evelyn Waugh books on your device.
After all, what would Waugh say?
