Ursula K. Le Guin's son authorized some changes to the new editions of her children's books--it sounds like this will work much better than the Roald Dahl changes. I have mixed feelings about publishers changing old books because honestly it would be better to just publish new, diverse authors rather than pretend dead English bigots weren't actually bigots, but Le Guin is such a treasure (and not a bigot!) 💖 https://lithub.com/why-i-decided-to-update-the-language-in-ursula-k-le-guins-childrens-books/
@sofiav I'd draw the line at children's books. There is a certain level of understanding needed to be able to move an author's words into a time context, but I agree with Theo Downes -Le Guin's statement on not underestimating children's ability to intuit meaning.
I would hope these books would be labeled, "modernized", or some other indicator of change, and include "the reasons for the proposed revisions, the extent of change, and especially who is doing the revising"
@dynamic @sofiav I don't see any reason to change words in adult books. There's no reason to hide the attitudes of the time when the book was written from adults who should be able to understand this.
I really don't see a reason to hide history from children either, but there's a precedence with abridged versions.
I don't know how popular "abridged" versions of books are with adults. I learned to go look for unabridged before I was a teen.
Abridgements are pretty popular with adults. Look at the success of Reader's Digest. Also, (at least as of... heh, like 20 years ago when I last shopped for books on CD) I've found that abridgement is extremely common in audiobooks, to the point where it can sometimes be difficult to find unabridged versions.
I wasn't sure whether they still existed (though I suspected they did). A quick internet search does point to an official website for Reader's Digest: https://www.rd.com/
@lwriemen @dynamic yeah, doing this for adult books makes absolutely no sense. So far the only adult books I've heard are being edited this way are the James Bond books which...wat
An easier thing to do with authors like HP Lovecraft or Arthur Conan Doyle is to put out collections of "selected short stories" and just not include the most problematic ones--as long as there are complete collections available as well, I think that's fine