I love to read, but I’ve never quite trusted eReaders. To me, it doesn’t matter if the eReader in question is a Nook, or a Kindle, or any of the other varieties. It just isn’t the same as holding an actual book, made of paper, in my hands. The electronic version cannot replace the feel of the weight of the book as I pick it up, the sound of the pages turning, the texture of those pages, or that freshly-printed book smell.
A blogger named Phillip Howard, who writes the Ocracoke Island Journal found another way that eBooks are vastly different from paper books. The text in an eBook can easily be changed from what the original author wrote into something the author never intended.
Phillip was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace on his Nook. He downloaded this classic work of literature onto his Nook for $0.99. The Nook is the eReader that comes from Barnes & Noble. As he was reading, he came across a sentence that stuck out. Something seemed different about it. The sentence read:
“It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….”
That odd misspelling made the sentence jump out. Tolstoy never used the word “Nookd”. When Phillip compared the Nook version of War and Peace to an actual hardcover book version, he found that what Tolstoy actually wrote was:
“It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern…”
In other words, the work kindle had been removed from the text, and had been replaced by Nook. Conspiracy theorists on the internet are saying that this error was intentional, in an effort to prevent people from reading the word kindle and having that lead to the desire to purchase a Kindle from Amazon.
What most likely happened was that the substitution of the word kindle with the word Nook, (odd capitalization included), was nothing more than a Copy-Paste error.
The publisher may have originally put together a digital copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in a format designed for the Kindle. Later, the publisher made a version that would be the right format for the Nook. It is possible that the publisher told the software to do a universal find-replace, and change the word Kindle to Nook – never realizing that the word kindle actually appeared in the text of the book.
I think I’ll just stick with the old-fashioned books made of paper, thanks.
Image from Bn.com.
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