Consider it another front on the battle of the e-readers. An eagle-eyed Barnes & Noble customer in the US spotted a distinctly disturbing change in the text of his digital copy of Tolstoy’s classic War & Peace: several words throughout the book had been replaced, namely the words “kindle” had been replaced by “Nook”.
Philip commented:
“As I was reading, I came across this sentence: ‘It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….’ Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, 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.
For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: ‘It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern….’ “
The error was caused by an over-zealous third party who supplied the edition to Barnes & Noble and has since been rectified. Yet we expect Tolstoy (and Orwell, no doubt) might consider this a front too far in the hotted-up war of global literary distribution but it also serves as a cautionary tale to keep a keen lookout for product placement, wherever it may appear.
Full story: War and Nookd