Ebooks and 'Textual Stability'

Is the Internet Turning Books into Perpetual Works-in-Progress?   (The New Republic, 9/22/2011)

Excerpt: Of course, it wasn’t always this simple for a book to stay relevant when unexpected events upended its premise. Norman Angell published The Great Illusion in 1908, arguing that war was unprofitable and therefore unlikely for the foreseeable future; when war broke out in 1914, critics pounced on his thesis and Angell spent the next few years releasing updated print editions of his book in a struggle to clarify that he had not meant that war was impossible.

But today, e-books have made post-publication tinkering newly convenient. Amazon sends e-mails to customers to inform them when an updated text—with assorted typos and factual errors corrected—of a book they’ve purchased is available for download, as it has done with titles ranging from The Lord of the Rings to Stacey Schiff’s Cleopatra. Could the e-book become a mutable thing that evolves with its circumstances, independent of the book it descended from? And is this a sign that our expectation for a book is shifting from finished product to perpetual work-in-progress—or just the logical conclusion of a long tradition of multiple, unstable texts?

“Textual stability,” to borrow historian Robert Darnton’s phrase, has never really existed in the publishing word. Voltaire produced so many addenda and corrected editions of his published books that some frustrated readers refused to buy his complete works until after he died. The widely circulated eighteenth-century edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie featured hundreds of pages that the original version had not included. In the nineteenth century, the French composer Ambroise Thomas wrote a different ending for his opera of Hamlet to appeal to those who found the bloodshed a bit too gory.

Scholars for generations have issued second and third and fourth editions of texts to renovate outdated information. And some authors of fiction have even capitalized on the opportunity presented by new editions to modernize anachronisms. When F. Paul Wilson’s 1984 novel The Tomb was reissued in 2004, Wilson swapped mentions of a “VCR” for “DVD player” and removed a comment about Johnny Carson, who had since retired from The Tonight Show.