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War and Nookd — eBook Regex Gone Haywire

Posted by Soulskill on from the thinking-things-through dept.

PerlJedi tips a story that highlights one of the downsides to ebooks. A blogger who recently read Tolstoy's War and Peace on his Nook stumbled upon some odd phases, such as: "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern..." After seeing the word 'Nookd' a few more times, he found a dead-tree version of the book and discovered that the word was supposed to be 'kindled.' Every instance of the word 'kindle' in the ebook had been replaced with 'Nook.' "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."

9 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Okay, Okay It Was Me by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    But I went back and searched every kindle and cranny to set every instance of the word back to kindle to fix it.

    I'm only human.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Okay, Okay It Was Me by AKabral · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Accidentally replacing nookd with kindled (or verse visa) is hilarious.

      But...

      When you intentionally mar a national treasure due to current political correctness:
      http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/01/06/1555251/the-continued-censorship-of-huckleberry-finn/ - where they searched and replaced "ni99a" with "slave" from Huckleberry Finn...

      Well that's just arrogant (demonstrates a belief in the superiority of current social mores over historical realities) spineless (so our genteel sexting children don't have to face the fact that some Americans enslaved and legislated the inferiority of a whole race) and impoverishing (robs people of the opportunity for a real authentic discussion of the troubled history of race in this country).

      --
      The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. - Thorstein
    2. Re:Okay, Okay It Was Me by DavidTC · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Setting aside the idea of whether or not the word should be replaced at all, replacing it with 'slave' is deeply stupid.

      I understand how that word can make the book hard to read, and if people want to release altered versions, whatever...but the word to substitute in is 'Negro' or 'colored', not 'slave'. 'Nigger' isn't about Jim's state of enslavement, it's about his skin-color. He will still be called that slur whether or not he is free, he will always be seen as 'other' and 'not part of society', not because of his enslavement status, but because of his pigmentation

      Glossing over that is revisionist history of the worse kind, leading to a total screwed up lesson that, hey, Jim is now free, thus not a slave, and hence all those people who were so concerned about him being a nigger^Wslave will be entirely happy now, and Jim's entire life will be fluffy bunnies from now on and he'll be invited to their dinner parties.

      I don't know how Mark Twain would feel about his text being altered, I suspect that he'd be happy that racial slurs are no longer accepted, and could conceivable be okay with changing the text so that people continued to read it...but I suspect he'd be rather annoyed at the new text conflating racial prejudice with slavery. (And, thus, sans slavery, everything is fine.)

      --
      If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
    3. Re:Okay, Okay It Was Me by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Informative
      Take your pick:

      There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule--and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time. - Letter to Denver Post dated Aug. 14, 1902; also published in NY Tribune Aug. 22, 1902 (regarding banning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Denver Library.)

      But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me. - Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 7 February 1907

      Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak, because a baby can't chew it.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  2. sed -i ... by i.r.id10t · · Score: 5, Funny

    sed -i s/wand/wang/g Harry\ Potter*

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
    1. Re:sed -i ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      for those who haven't read the referenced bash.org quote :

      <JonJonB> Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word "wand" with "wang" in the first Harry Potter Book
      <JonJonB> Let's see the results...

      <JonJonB> "Why aren't you supposed to do magic?" asked Harry.
      <JonJonB> "Oh, well -- I was at Hogwarts meself but I -- er -- got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an' everything

      <JonJonB> A magic wang... this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

      <JonJonB> "Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work."
      <JonJonB> "Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "

      <JonJonB> Harry took the wang. He felt a sudden warmth in his fingers. He raised the wang above his head, brought it swishing down through the dusty air and a stream of red and gold sparks shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light on to the walls

      <JonJonB> "Oh, move over," Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry's wang, tapped the lock, and whispered, 'Alohomora!"

      <JonJonB> The troll couldn't feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll will notice if you stick a long bit of wood up its nose, and Harry's wang had still been in his hand when he'd jumped - it had gone straight up one of the troll's nostrils.

      <JonJonB> He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll's nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.

      <JonJonB> He ran onto the field as you fell, waved his wang, and you sort of slowed down before you hit the ground. Then he whirled his wang at the dementors. Shot silver stuff at them.

      <JonJonB> Ok
      <JonJonB> I have found, definitive proof
      <JonJonB> that J.K Rowling is a dirty DIRTY woman, making a fool of us all
      <JonJonB> "Yes," Harry said, gripping his wang very tightly, and moving into the middle of the deserted classroom. He tried to keep his mind on flying, but something else kept intruding.... Any second now, he might hear his mother again... but he shouldn't think that, or he would hear her again, and he didn't want to... or did he?
      <melusine > O_______O
      <JonJonB> Something silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wang

      <JonJonJonB> Then, with a sigh, he raised his wang and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.

      <JonJonJonB> 'Get - off - me!' Harry gasped. For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncles sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wang.

  3. Re:Amusing, but... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, this story is definitely an amusing anecdote, but I feel like TFA has the wrong takeaway. The fact is, while this specific issue is obviously e-book related, the overall problem of poor quality, low cost public domain publications is in no way specific to e-books. There have always been low budget publishing houses that print poorly edited, poorly translated versions of public domain works. Spend some time digging around used book sales, you'll find an endless supply of these, most notably from the 60's and 70's.

    No, the sad part is full price books from Amazon with incoherent pagination, horribly over recompressed jpegs and a verdant sea of spelling errors. I'd give Project Gutenberg a pass for those sorts of things except that the majority of PG books I've read are actually pretty well done.

    When I'm paying top dollar for a product, I'd like some attempt at quality control....

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  4. Romeo & Juliet by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

    But soft, what light through yonder Linux breaks?
    It is the east, and Juliet is the Oracle(TM).
    Arise, fair Oracle(TM), and kill the envious moon,
    Who is already sick and pale with grief
    That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she

  5. Scunthorpe Problem by constpointertoconst · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a Wikipedia article about this issue:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

    "The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's dirty-word filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring cunt.[1] Years later, Google's filters apparently made the same mistake, preventing residents from searching for local businesses that included Scunthorpe in their names.[2]"

    There is also a stub article about a specific instance of the replacement effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medireview