The idea of “testing out” a book’s characters or plot line after it has already been published and then going back and changing the story completely contradicts my idea of what a book should be and should accomplish. While I am sure that some of the thinking that goes into a book considers what people will want to read, a book should be about something the author wants to teach to the reader. If the readers constantly dictated what should be written there would be much less creativity and variety in published works. The idea of an author going back and tampering with a book’s storyline after it has been published is very much like an artist walking up to his painting in an art gallery and altering the subject of his painting.
The ease with which things can be published and widely viewed means that we as readers have a responsibility to take everything we read with a grain of salt. Now this caution ought to begin to extend to even textbooks and documented history. Events can that we believed to be permanent facts can be neatly altered with niceties added.
I was also thinking that as easily as e-books can be published and spread, they can probably be eliminated in the same way. When a book is published under normal circumstances, it would be next to impossible to gather up all the copies (or even a majority of the copies). Once distributed, those books are permanently out in society.
Comments on Oldham's Comments:
I'm usually quite a cynical person so that's where the "grain of salt" comment probably came from. I guess that I was just thinking that people who don't have any skepticism most definitely ought to get some. And somehow I reasoned that because everything electronically published is somehow connected and also relies on internet and technology so it seems more unstable to me than distributing physical copies of a book. But I can definitely see that once things get on the internet they seem to be ineradicable. My idea would probably only exist with extreme circumstances or advances in technology.
I was not asking why you wanted to take things with a grain of salt -- what I meant was, if we assume (almost) everything become mutable then how do we go about taking things with a grain of salt? I agree whole heartedly that skepticism is called for. But I tend to think that the skepticism will be resolved one way or another, and if there is a high level of mutability I wonder where the resolution comes from. In other words, historically I can take things with a grain of salt but hope for resolution. In the extreme case of Carr's mutable world, that hope for resolution seems to be missing.
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