Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service allows authors to upload changes or even new versions to published books. This allows mistakes or typos to be corrected. New information can also be incorporated.
However, governments and school boards can alter works to create politically correct versions. And readers can be tracked to discover how they progress through the material.
“An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one,” writes Nicholas Carr in The Wall Street Journal. “The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”
“The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book,” suggests Carr. “What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.”
Are we losing the sense of having a finished work? Will unfinished videos and films be next?
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