While acknowledging the ease with which authors can correct mistakes, Nicholas Carr worries about what comes with that privilege:
The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They'll be able to edit textbooks that don't fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. … The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book in response to such signals, adding a few choice words here, trimming a chapter there, maybe giving a key character a quick makeover. What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.
Building off Carr, Sam Krowchenko comments on "our need for the outdated":
When David Foster Wallace republished his 2000 article on John McCain in 2008, its inaccuracies were the key to its relevance — voters could compare the idealism of the 2000 Straight Talk Express McCain with the cynicism of his 2008 bid. That Wallace did not re-edit his work to reflect McCain’s change made his the writing all the more powerful. It was up to the reader to discern McCain’s transformation, not up to Wallace to point it out. … We need supposedly “self-contained,” outdated works to remind us of the process by which we arrived at the most accurate and contemporary works. If change becomes as easy as the rewriting of a digital document, we’ll only be able to see where we are. We’ll have no clue where we’ve been.
My recent thoughts on the publishing industry here.
The Dish 