There was quite a long article in the April 12 edition of the Sunday Telegraph which discussed in detail the alteration of children’s E-books without readers, of even the authors being aware of the changes. I am not able to find the original, which was quite critical of publishers. Instead, there is a shorter version which I found on PressReadeer.com which includes some of the original text written by Liam Kelly. I quote from the shorter version below. The full length version has disappeared, and does not even appear in his list of Telegraph articles – perhaps because publishers objected to it.The original title was “Publishers are altering children’s books on the sly”.

Liam Kelly is a senior culture writer and covers the full sweep of arts and entertainment, from literary prizes to Eurovision. He reported live from Oasis’s reunion gigs and played The Traitors on location in Scotland with Claudia Winkleman. Liam has been shortlisted for a number of awards. He has even won a few.

Liam Kelly

“Updated edi­tions of nov­els have been around for almost as long as books have been prin­ted en masse. Many print edi­tions will include details such as when a book was first pub­lished, and when the edi­tion you are read­ing was prin­ted; some will say whether any­thing has been changed, giv­ing read­ers a heads-up. And every­body knows, thanks to a 2023 Tele­graph exposé, how Roald Dahl’s work has been severely bowd­ler­ised.

But in the era of the E-book, nov­els sud­denly seem wor­ry­ingly fun­gible. They live in a cloud com­put­ing sys­tem; they can be tweaked at any time, for any reason, without you – the reader who bought the book – being aler­ted.

“I do tend to think that once something’s been writ­ten, that’s what it is and it’s what we should accept,” says David Fick­ling, the founder of the eponym­ous chil­dren’s pub­lisher, whose authors include Philip Pull­man. He’s scorn­ful of pub­lish­ers who try and – as with the cack-handed Pretty Little Liars edits – fail to get down with the kids. “We all make the mis­take of overthink­ing that we know what chil­dren want,” he says. “We can remem­ber what we wanted when we were chil­dren. I can remem­ber what I wanted, but that’s not the same as what an eight-year-old wants now.”

Industry sources say that any updates would usu­ally be done in agree­ment with the author. But that isn’t always the case. RL Stine – who wrote the mul­ti­mil­lion­selling Goose­bumps series of hor­ror nov­els – reacted with, well, hor­ror when it was revealed in 2023 that his work had been “san­it­ised” without his input. In Dahl style, one fat char­ac­ter went from being “plump” to “cheer­ful”; “crazy” became “silly”; a char­ac­ter who was described as hav­ing “at least six chins” turned into one who was “at least six feet six”. And the text was also silently made con­tem­por­ary: a Walk­man was replaced by an iPod, lest read­ers be flum­moxed by the idea of a cas­sette.

Lois Duncan, the author of the 1973 best­seller I Know What You Did Last Sum­mer, had in the years before her death in 2016 made some such revi­sions her­self. “I loved going through the nov­els,” she said in 2010, “and giv­ing the char­ac­ters cell phones and com­puters, and chan­ging their clothes so they were no longer wear­ing poly­es­ter pant­suits. And of course I changed the dia­logue slightly so that it soun­ded more con­tem­por­ary.”

Jonny Geller, the chief exec­ut­ive of the lead­ing lit­er­ary agency Curtis Brown, tells me that he doesn’t like this habit of ret­ro­spect­ive book fid­dling. “Even a novel set in the 1990s should be accur­ate,” he says. “How are we ever going to look back and know what it really was like to live in that time, if we keep try­ing to go after the atten­tion span of a very young per­son who doesn’t know much?”

Geller points to the surge in pop­ular­ity for David Nich­olls’s 2009 novel One Day, after Net­flix released a 2024 TV adapt­a­tion that remained faith­ful to the book’s ori­ginal 1990s set­ting. The novel, he says, had been “a big suc­cess among young people. I think they rev­elled in the period before phones and email. So I think it’s pos­sible to attract young read­ers… to fic­tion that’s older than 20 years and not have to update it.” To do oth­er­wise, he adds, is “pat­ron­ising, and actu­ally quite dam­aging about our per­cep­tion of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions and the world they lived in”.

For some authors, the changes are per­sonal. Stephen King released a “com­plete and uncut” edi­tion of The Stand in 1990, 12 years after the post-apo­ca­lyptic fantasy was ori­gin­ally pub­lished. Partly, this was because King’s pub­lisher had ori­gin­ally cut 400 pages from his manuscript; by now, he was an apex nov­el­ist and could rein­state large parts of the book. But he also took the oppor­tun­ity to shift the set­ting from 1980 to 1990, and made ref­er­ence to the Aids pan­demic and Madonna hits.

And in some lit­er­at­ure aimed at young adults, the changes are even use­ful. Take Are You There God? It’s Me, Mar­garet, Judy Blume’s much-loved com­ing-of-age novel. It was first pub­lished in 1970, and much of the story centres on the anxi­et­ies of a girl in early adoles­cence; she deals with her first peri­ods by using belts with san­it­ary nap­kins, which were com­mon at the time. After the advent and pop­ular­isa­tion of adhes­ive pads in the 1980s, Blume decided to update the book to reflect the change in real-world con­sumer habits, so as not to con­fuse or ali­en­ate future audi­ences.

Then again, there are times when this sort of tinker­ing badly back­fires. In 2010, Hachette made a great show of “sens­it­ively and care­fully” updat­ing Enid Blyton’s Fam­ous Five nov­els in order to make them “time­less”.

Blyton’s 1940s ref­er­ences to “house­mis­tress”, “awful swot­ter”, “mother and father” and “school tunic” became “teacher”, “book­worm”, “mum and dad” and “uni­form”, respect­ively. Even “jolly japes” was con­sidered a term too obscure for mod­ern chil­dren to grasp, while Anne’s “dolls” became “ted­dies” – lest she be seen as being too girly.

But they may have under­es­tim­ated young read­ers – or the par­ents and grand­par­ents buy­ing the books. Six years later, the pub­lish­ing house was forced to con­cede that the new ver­sions “didn’t work”. With the excep­tion of some “offens­ive” (ie racist) terms, they rein­stated Blyton’s prose as she had writ­ten it.”

While there may be a financial incentive for a publisher to alter a novel, at least they should obtain the author’s permission!