The invaluable Saul Tannenbaum passes along a tale of editing malfeasance, in which Barnes & Noble’s formatter, converting War and Peace for the Nook from a Kindle edition “changed every instance of ‘kindle’ or ‘kindled’ into ‘Nook’ and ‘Nookd’”:

The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s likely that Superior Formatting Publishing ported its Kindle version of War and Peace over to the Nook — doing a search and replace to make sure that any Kindle references they’d inserted, such as in the advertising at the end of the book about their fine Kindle products, were simply changed to Nook.

The unwitting hilarity of a publisher doing a “find and replace” and accidentally changing the text of a canonical work of Western thought is alarming. Many versions of e-books are from similar outfits, that distribute public domain works formatted for Kindle or Nook at the lowest possible prices. The great democratizing factor of the ebook formats – that anyone can easily distribute – can also mean that readers can never be quite sure that they are viewing the texts as the author intended.

It is nice for books to be cheap, available in a format that’s transportable, and portable from device to device. It’s not nice for them to be produced so cheaply that the text is altered in a way that ruins the integrity of the art the reading experience. There are some parts of producing any kind of art that can be made less expensive with technology. And my understanding is that many publishers now do less editing than they used to before books reach the market. But incidents like this should be a reminder that there’s a hard floor it’s not worth crashing through to make products cheaper.

There are some good defenses of Jonathan Franzen, particularly from an archival perspective, in our thread in his comments on E-Readers (I’m glad no one’s defending the idea that the president is too busy to read fiction, though). I absolutely agree with everyone who says we need to think carefully about and allocate appropriate resources to digital archiving. But I think Simon Pits raises the most convincing argument in defense of Franzen’s worries about e-readers making literature impermanent. He says:

Franzen’s point is that with a e-books, an author never need “finish” writing a book. The ability to constantly revise, improve or worsen and censor remains. While authors, publishers and distributors today aren’t taking full advantage of this, certainly it cannot be far. Think of the controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn. In an e-book world, Nigger Jim gets renamed to Jim or Black Jim or Slave Jim or something that may offend fewer, but tells us less about the culture and society in which the book was written.

A couple of thoughts. First, I think even though it’s theoretically possible to keep editing a digital manuscript in a way it’s not possible to change a print copy, there are still some structural factors mitigating against it being a major problem. Most writers I know tend to feel that they have to walk away from a project at some point, if only for their own sanity. I know writing a novel is different from blogging, of course, but even then, folks feel like they have to be done sometime. And even if they don’t, I think there’s probably a limit to the extent to which digitial publishers are going to be willing to push fixes, something that requires a lot of file maintenance, checking to make sure changes haven’t introduced new errors, and then either updating or getting readers to update their texts, something that might seem particularly annoying for new tweaks rather than minor functionality.

And second, there’s been real resistance to authors going back and fiddling with what are considered foundational texts, whether George Lucas is making Greedo shoot first or an edition of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word “nigger” with “slave.” These alterations tend to be treated as a kind of cowardice, whether it’s Lucas lacking the courage to make Han Solo kind of a jerk or the political correctness that avoids exposing people to uncomfortable ideas and words even if those things might move their thinking forward. I don’t normally trust the market with a lot of things. But I’m actually reasonably confident that outcries against endless tinkering, customer demands for the portability of content from device to device and from format to format, and the desire to retain customers will make it easier to preserve digital content in its original form. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to back up those forces with an independent dedication to digital archiving. But unless things change, I think this might be a case where customers’ demands and the imperative to preserve texts are relatively closely aligned.

Jonathan Franzen has been in the news lately for saying two things. First, he told attendees at the Hay Festival that e-readers are a threat to our society:

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough…a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience…Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Then, in the same speech, he apparently voiced some skepticism about whether President Obama should be spending his time reading: “One of the reasons I love Barack Obama as much as I do is that we finally have a real reader in the White House. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s one of us running the U.S. [Although] when I heard he was reading Freedom I thought, ‘Why are you reading a novel? There are important things to be doing!”

Now, I’m obviously a big advocate of having a reader in the White House, both because I think consuming smart culture, whether it’s Freedom or Homeland can provide perspective on both issues and the national mindset, and because I think even presidents need a break. I’ve never particularly understood people who object to presidential leisure, within reasonable limits, of course. The presidency is an incredibly difficult job, probably too large for one person. But if we’re going to have one person do it, that person needs to be saved from burnout and insanity as best as possible, a process that means both vacations and reading things that are not giant briefings with check boxes attached.

On the larger issue of e-readers, I’m not sure I see Franzen’s point. Most e-readers don’t contain the option to alter the words of the text itself, only to highlight, add bookmarks, and marginalia and notes. Having a print copy of a book doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be treated with reverence, as any college student or deeply engaged reader’s marked-up texts can attest. The move from cotton paper to pulp-based paper actually means that our books are less permanent and lasting edifices than they used to be. Digital copies may last longer, and in more pristine condition, than our paperbacks of today do. That doesn’t mean that books can’t be fetish objects, or artwork, of course. But digital can offer its own interactivity, picture quality, etc., and so if you’re just critiquing the form in terms of its permanence, I think Franzen is barking up the wrong tree. The real question should be whether any innovation in the form brings in more readers and gets them to read more books. It’s still early, but research suggests that people who own e-readers are upping their book consumption. From both an economic and an intellectual perspective, that should make Franzen pretty happy.