The Sunday paper today had a feature that mentioned the Nook e-reader replacing all instances on the letters ‘kindle’ in War and Peace with the letters ‘nook’, resulting in such deathless prose as “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern.”[1]
“Surely that can’t be true,” I thought. So I turned of course to the Internet to find the truth. Sure enough, NBC News had an article about it. According to this article though it was an error made when converting the Kindle version of the book to the Nook version, not a deliberate attempt by Barnes & Noble to strike the word ‘kindle’ from common usage.
Just remember, these are the same[2] people that are bringing us the driverless car. I’ll be keeping my hands on the wheel, thank you very much.
[1] They didn’t even try to maintain the capitalization of the original text!
[2] Not literally the same people of course. The book was converted by a group called, amusingly, Superior Formatting Publishing and the driverless car I mentioned above is being developed by Google. And as all of us who use gmail, Google Docs, Chrome, and the Android operating system know, Google doesn’t make mistakes in their programming.
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