It is very rare to find
advocacy for the human factor on a technocentric Web site. Nevertheless, last
night Fox Van Allen filed a
story
for Tecca that actually used the phrase “professional editing” with absolutely
no disparagement. It also began with the sentence:
Editors are pretty important
people.
What was it that awakened Van
Allen from his technocentric slumbers? The answer is Barnes & Noble (of
course, of course). It turns out that B&N management has blocked any use of
the work “kindle” in any text that is included in the Nook Book Store, since,
in capitalized form, it is the name of a competing product. What happened was
that a blogger named
Philip Howard
decided to try reading Leo Tolstoy’s
War
and Peace on his Nook and encountered:
It was as if a light had been
Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …
As Howard reported in his
post, he
eventually realized that “Nookd” had replaced the word “kindled.” Apparently
what counts for editing over at B&N amounted to a Replace All operation on
the full text with a case-independent “kindle” being replaced by “Nook.” Mind
you, real editing would have involved a full review of the final text before it
was released; and in this particular case we happen to be talking about
War and Peace. What would that do to the
overall efficiency of daily operations? After all, Barnes & Noble is a
business, and a business has to have priorities!
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