Today in TechNook version of War and Peace contains embarrassing search-and-replace error
Editors are pretty important people. They keep books, magazines, and even websites error free. But what happens when you take shortcuts and skimp on professional editing? You open yourself up to significant embarrassment, as the publisher of the Nook e-book version of War and Peace is finding out.
While reading a copy he downloaded on his Barnes & Noble Nook for 99 cents, eagle-eyed blogger Philip Howard noticed the odd usage of the word "Nookd." It was a bizarre inclusion, but since War and Peace is translated from the original Russian, the word didn't truly stand out.
"Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software," Howard explains, "I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text."
It turns out that every instance of "kindled" had been replaced with "Nookd," with Kindle, of course, being the name of Nook's competitor. It's believed the mistake happened as a result of a lazy application for inclusion in the Nook Book Store. The book's publisher likely performed a search-and-replace to change all references to Amazon's competing e-book Kindle, not realizing that Leo Tolstoy had used the word "kindled" no fewer than eight times in the text.
[via dvice]
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
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