When I first read this, I was furious with the publisher. While I'm still disgusted by the behavior I am under the impression that the Dahl estate supports the historical revisions.
So what response should the company receive? Boycott? Hacktivism? Flagrant piracy? Perhaps not. Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously? Should a blurb indicating the edit be required on the cover of the book?
Instead, I think a more grassroots effort is desperately needed. We need something akin to a software license that an individual author can include in their contracts with publishers and in their estate planning. It should be entirely frictionless and unambiguous. It should be the easiest path for an author to take.
I propose that a small foundation be created for the purpose of its creation and dissemination; and that a public website / petition exist so that any author publishing today can see that the idea is endorsed by the very people who inspired them to become writers.
I think framing this in terms of the author is the wrong way. Dahl doesn't care that his wishes are not being respected, because he's dead. It's society at large that is being damaged by these changes. Really, rewriting old copyright works while removing access to the old versions (wether approved by the original author or not) goes against the copryight deal: to incentivize creation by granting a limited time monopoly. If that monopoly is used to remove a work or version of it then that's a break of that contract and we should legally recognize such breaches by removing absolving the other side of the monopoly. Remember that once shared, creative works are not the property of the author alone but of everyone.
Many European countries have this notion of moral rights of an author that persist even if she sells the copyright, including the right not to have their work altered. The problem here is the estate who represent the author after death are doing the altering, in defiance of Dahl’s explicit wishes when he was still alive. Authors should definitely put clauses in their wills to prevent this in the future and possibly legislation passed to make this the default.
> In what situations is it acceptable to edit words that someone wrote?
When the author is present and engaged in the process.
Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
> Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously?
No, except perhaps that they should not be permitted to sell versions that are modified if they claim to be the original work by the original author; if they do not claim such a thing, then it should be permitted. (However, the original version should still be made available too. If it was not copyright then anyone could do so if they want to do.)
However, they should not remotely change ebooks automatically in this way. This is independent of whether or not they are allowed to make modified versions (which should be allowed).
> Should a blurb indicating the edit be required on the cover of the book?
Yes. There are a few ways to do such a thing; one way would be to write "abridged" like another comment in this thread suggests. But it should be marked so it is clear that it is different from the original work.
Your own link: Dahl found himself sympathizing with their concerns and published a revised edition -- that's great. His book, he can do what he wants.
Publishers editing books of their own accord after the author is dead to please imaginary mobs -- something else entirely. Not great. Bad. Very bad. Regardless of the type of edit or politics involved.
Dahl made a choice not to lay down restrictions in his will and not to appoint literary executors who he'd ensured would refuse to change things. He may or may not have disapproved of any given set of changes, but the absence of any such terms is implicit consent for his estate to do as it pleases.
I have published books. They'll likely never be worth anything. But the absence of any terms about them in my will is intentional: Once I'm gone, I don't give a shit what my inheritors do with the rights for them. That's their business.
As for authenticity, the originals still exist. Nothing has erased them. Deposit laws means the original editions will be on file at relevant libraries even if every customer got rid of theirs. I'm all for ensuring original editions remain at least somehow accessible, but this obsession with changes to books now just strikes me as comical given how long abridged, simplified or simply reimagined versions of classics have existed.
Though chances are good that what you've read and consider "authentic" wasn't the original anyway, but one of the earlier revised editions. E.g. the version most people will have read was revised to change the Oompa-Loompas from African pygmies.
>When the author is present and engaged in the process.
Does this mean you would be fine with this process if it involved the author even if they approved of changes to a book decades after it was originally released?
>Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
>Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
Does this mean that in situations in which the author is dead and the books are still under copyright that you are ok with a publisher that decides to stop publishing the book, basically the Dr. Seuss situation?
The estate of the author does not have legitimate authority to change a dead authors work to increase its commercial appeal. They can legally do so, but I don't accept the legitimacy of this. The only exception is when it's implicitly or explicitly clear the author would have supported doing this, and even then I wouldn't suggest it but I wouldn't automatically call it illegitimate and would have to consider the context.
If I write some great novel and then my asshole grandson decides to stop distributing the original and starts distributing a rewrite he feels will sell more copies I'll haunt his ass. I refused to watch the C.S. Lewis film adaptions because they were against the authors explicit wishes and there's a difference between having the legal right to do something and the moral right to do something.
I recall that Roald Dahl LOATHED the changes to his story in the film version of Willa Wonka and refused to sell the rights to the sequel so I wouldn't at all take it for granted that he would have supported such extensive edits. If there's doubt if an author would have supported you editing their book, you should play it safe and not edit a dead authors book! If you must change it - you must continue distributing the original or make the original public domain to retain any SEMBLANCE of legitimacy.
But shouldn't we allow the rights holders to change things that they consider haven't aged well to allow broader appeal? Should they be required to publish the same version that they disagree with in perpetuity?
> I'm okay with new books being published that clean up the old stories, but they can't rightly list Roald Dahl as the author. The author on the cover needs to be "Roald Dahl & Whoever".
That will probably happen — multiple times — as soon as the (original) books are in the public domain, but right now there is no way the publisher is going to give a cut of the sales to a 2nd named author (especially since anyone good would also push back on some of the ill-considered changes).
I honestly expected many more people to push back on this point, and not jump whole-heartedly to the extreme that even the original author should not be allowed to change a work once published.
The only real counter-argument I can make to the position that the author can edit his works but his heirs cannot is that the author chooses his heirs; the author could have instead chosen to will his works into the public domain after his death, or establish a trust or foundation with a strict mandate to republish his works in their original form while returning the profits to his heirs.
It's not a particularly strong argument -- many authors may not have the resources or foresight to make such provisions, and you could just as easily insist on authors who do wish their heirs to manage their works and not simply profit from them make explicit declarations on that point -- which is why I lead with the more extreme case of an author editing his own work.
The publisher should definitely be able to choose what they wanna sell, and issue new revisions as they see fit. Going into my house and rewriting instances of the work that I already own is insane. This is just as ridiculous as if Amazon were to delete ebooks you've purchased for your Kindle.
I think very few people can claim to an absolute principle against any kind of editing of books for children, since this has been happening for as long as books and children existed, including in the past century -- does anybody buy a "Grimm's Fairy Tales" book expecting to find "The Jew Among Thorns" included?
There is also not a free speech issue at play here other than that already imposed by the copyright system. The Dahl estate is not being forced to make these changes, and indeed nobody can compel them to authorize publishing an unaltered version of the books (under current law).
But once you've set those grander questions aside, you can evaluate this specific case. Do you agree with the purpose of the edits? Do you think they're appropriate in degree and scope? I would say that I am somewhat sympathetic to the intention of some of the edits. Dahl fielded objections to his work during his lifetime, and pushed back strongly against the suggestion that his books were unsuitable for children for moral reasons [1], but he also changed (or permitted his publisher to change) the Oompa-Loompas from an African tribe to something more fantastical. These kinds of spot changes can be seen as analogous to a parent or teacher reading aloud and skimming past occasional material [2] that they don't find suitable for their audience.
It's the scope and degree of the changes here that I find inappropriate. This is not a scalpel removing a small blemish, it's a complete makeover. It's replacing Dahl's world (and his worldview) with a different one. Many of the changes feel arbitrary (Matilda can't read Conrad and Kipling? But Austen and Steinbeck are fine?) and others mutilate the humor or the meaning of the work. And there's no indication that unedited [3] versions of the work will be kept in print. For those reasons I think this is a terrible decision that should be reconsidered. If schools want reading material more compatible with modern mores there are many authors writing today. Or they can work to help kids get context on where Dahl was coming from. Authors don't need to be presented as moral exemplars.
[1]: https://www.hbook.com/story/charlie-chocolate-factory-reply
[2]: I recall a schoolteacher skimming past a scene in a book where a teenage boy was drawing a picture of his girl friend -- later, reading the book, I realized there was a brief reference to him "flushing at the swelling of her breast" or something along those lines.
[3]: Many books are edited with the author's permission after release, so what "unedited" means is complex (and makes some of the "you lose copyright if you bowdlerize your book" solutions I've seen to this difficult).
What stops you from publishing the version of the Bible or the Quran with your edits? Nothing. Maybe nobody wants to read it, but that’s your marketing problem.
If copyright were shorter, we could similarly have Dahl in any number of edits and adaptations. And personally I don’t see any problem with that.
It's not so much that there are edits, but in the case of the Oompa-Loompas, Dahl made his own edits, after being convinced of the need to do it by the NAACP.
We don't know if Dahl would have been convinced of the need to make any of these new edits, because he died over 30 years ago. These unknown editors peddle their changes using his name, they trade on his popularity, rather than write their own unloved, status-quo compliant stories.
We the public are so lucky that the publishers deign to keep selling his original books in addition to their Bowdlerised versions. But if they felt like it, thanks to copyright law, they could stop that at any time for the next 40 years or so. It's ludicrious!
I counter: it should be okay for anyone to retroactively edit books. The problem here is not that the books are being made worse, but that the copyright holders are the ones doing it, they’re the only ones who can legally publish the book, and thus as used copies deteriorate and disappear, the only legally published editions available will be the censored versions.
If someone thinks that authors shouldn't be allowed to update their own works, it's a bizarre position to me, but they've already accepted it, so I'm not sure what rhetoric to use to discuss it further.
I can at least talk to you about whether it's reasonable for eg Brian Herbert or (the now-late) Christopher Tolkien to continue to exercise editorial control over their fathers' works, or under what conditions a foundation could be established for the duration of the 90-years-post-author-death copyright the US currently uses.
If it's permissible for Dr Seuss's widow to inherit editorial control of her husband's work along with the copyright, can she pass that control to Dr Seuss Enterprises; if not, could Dr Seuss have established it before his death?
(Personally I think the other reply was better, in stating that it is arrogant to assume that the author's heirs do not know his wishes better than us.)
I think that they shouldn't remotely update ebooks, regardless of their content. (For this and other reasons, I don't really like ebooks, and I like to have a printed copy.) (It can make sense to publish errata if there are mistakes (e.g. a word is missing or misspelled, or a number is wrong), but even then you should not automatically remotely update them, and they should keep track of the changes. A public version control system would help in this case.)
I think that the original versions should be preserved, but that they can make modified versions too if they want to do; however, the modified versions should not be called Roald Dahl's original versions, and should not be claimed to be them; they should be something else. (Fortunately, this seems to be what they are doing, in this case, so that is good, but it does not justify remotely updating the ebooks.) (Copyright often makes both such things difficult though if you do not hold the copyright, but copyright is bad and should be abolished, and then you can both preserve original versions and make modified versions.)
So what response should the company receive? Boycott? Hacktivism? Flagrant piracy? Perhaps not. Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously? Should a blurb indicating the edit be required on the cover of the book?
Instead, I think a more grassroots effort is desperately needed. We need something akin to a software license that an individual author can include in their contracts with publishers and in their estate planning. It should be entirely frictionless and unambiguous. It should be the easiest path for an author to take.
I propose that a small foundation be created for the purpose of its creation and dissemination; and that a public website / petition exist so that any author publishing today can see that the idea is endorsed by the very people who inspired them to become writers.
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