Leo Tolstoy couldn’t have possibly known that the war between competing ereaders would result in the mucking up of his magnum opus. Ars Technica reports that in a budget Nook version of War and Peace, every instance of the word “Kindled” has been replaced by “Nookd.”
The “Nookd” problem with the $US1 version of War and Peace was first observed by reader Philip Howard who wrote about it on his blog. Curse Barnes & Noble! Not so fast; the flawed edition of Tolstoy’s work probably had nothing to do with the book retailer and more likely resulted from some lazy find-and-replace work by the company that served the book up for sale, Superior Formatting Publishing. According to Ars Technica:
The best explanation, we think, comes from a commenter on the blog, who says “This obviously wasn’t done by Barnes & Noble, but by the publisher who submitted the book to Barnes & Noble. They created a Kindle version of this public domain book first, realised they used ‘Kindle’ somewhere in their submission, and did a quick find-and-replace to change ‘Kindle’ to ‘Nook’-never once thinking it would affect the book’s text rather than just whatever they put in the title page.”
Oops! It’s great that a digital version of basically any public domain classic is available for a song, but be very careful: don’t use them for a book report without consulting the master text. [Ocrkacoke Island Journal via Ars Technica via Dvice via Yahoo]