You may recall that Puffin had decided to rewrite Roadl Dahl classics to remove problematic language from his stories, which ignores the fact that part of the allure of his wonderfully twisted works is exactly that.
Now it appears that people with eBooks have discovered that their copies had been replaced by the Bowlderized version.
If you are dedicated to eBook readers, find a way to hack the copy protection and save a permanent copy that won't be taken away at the whim of a publisher, the criminal provisions of the DMCA be damned.
Just to remind you, in 2009, Amazon reached into people's Kindles to remove their copies of the George Orwell book 1984.
Talk about throwing things in the Memory Holw. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")
1 comments :
Just a reminder that The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting has been badly censored and rewritten since the 1980s at least. It is literally impossible to buy a non-used copy of the book that HASN'T been censored. And nobody seemed to care for the past 40 years.
On the plus side, the original book is in the public domain. You can download the original text and illustrations for free from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/501
I've been recommending that book and giving people that link on Reddit as often as possible. The "offensive" content, by the way, is anything but; a bit of cliched humor, but Prince Bumpo is clearly represented as having a "good heart" and he soon becomes part of the continuing Dolittle family. Well, he did become part of the family, but concerned prudes have removed him from pretty much every book in the series.
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