![]() ![]() ![]() For, as John Lavagnino noted as far back as 1993, it is a fundamental property of digital texts to be mutable: ‘as most have perceived, an electronic edition needn’t ever stop growing and changing’ ( Lavagnino, 1997: n. Some wondered whether Amazon might change editions of digital texts even while its customers were reading them ( Johnson, 2009). The notion that the contents of one’s library might vanish at the whim of a corporate giant caused great unease. Citing copyright problems as the reason for removal, Amazon brought to the fore the issue of unstable textual variants in the digital age in a way that made many readers uncomfortable. In what must surely have been one of the least well-thought-through corporate censorship moves in recent years, Amazon came under fire in 2009 for remotely removing a book from its users’ e-reading devices ( the ‘Kindle’). ![]() Further to this, I also signal here a number of reasons why critics might need to consider the production processes of contemporary fiction in order to deal with the multiple and different editions of this text and other contemporary novels. Within the constraints of copyright on contemporary fiction, this article sets out this textual variance and visually plots the re-ordering and re-writing of the Sonmi section of the novel across versions. In the section entitled ‘An Orison of Sonmi ~451’ these desynchronised rewritings are nearly total at the level of linguistic expression between UK and US paperbacks/electronic editions and there are a range of sub-episodes that only feature in one or other of the published editions. When the process was resumed at Random House under the editorial guidance of David Ebershoff, changes from New York were likewise not imported back into the UK edition. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into the US edition of the text. In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. ![]()
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