I'm not really out to say anything other than the current (summer 2019) Times item (which received over 500 comments) is an amazing coincidence - Orwell's dystopia had the "transcription" or "revised histories" thing as official policy in that society, and now that the copyrights have expired (?) the actual text of Orwell's words has apparently become a sort of free for all on the internet! So it's a form of piracy, yes. Big time.

It strongly reminded me of my experience of with this one art book I had, where this fairly large company here in my major center had engineered a complete rip-off, decades before Amazon.

The Times piece cites an example where a bootleg "quickie" reproduction of a book by Orwell contained "there was no copyright acknowledgment, no mention of the year 1945."

Bingo, that is what I saw. IIRC, my copy of the "revised" or reissued art book was presented as though all the material suddenly appeared in the 1970's or 1980's or thereabouts... they stole all the content and made good plates but they left out the copyright and authorship part. So there was no provenance whatsoever.

Unfortunately I lost my copy of the book in a major fire. Nobody hurt but it burned for days, total destruction, hundreds of fire trucks.

And so a couple of weeks ago I was in a bricks-and-mortar store, the same "brand" that ripped off the New York art book, and they've republished the entire Fleming catalog under their own moniker. They included a message that the material was now in the public domain, leaving me with the impression that it's all possibly legal, but it sure as heck shows some cheek!

Btw, just as an addendum to my experience with the art book, I was over on the main drag a few days ago and I was amazed to find THE REAL DEAL in a used book store: the New York publishing house that originally published the book in the 1920's (approx.) had apparently revised and edited the whole thing: all condensed for modern (eg. turn of the century) artists and smartly hard-bound. Cost me twenty bucks. A most pleasant surprise!

I have read that Ray was most resistant to the e-book phenomenom until very late in his career. Ironically if you go to the Google Play Store (yechhh, another big "multi" like Amazon) they have a collection called "bRAdburY stores" - they sort of play with the typography in the cover design. This e-book contains a wonderful foreword and because anyone can get a "free sample" we now have a situation where e-books are a sort of ambassador or herald for the entire, deep RB catalog.

Urp, sorry. Couple of typos in the previous post but I'm not going to "revise" them, heh.

The e-book that Google sells is called Bradbury Stories, not stores. My bad.

Yoho, ho ho and a bottle of rum! I suppose partly due to cognitive issues, and partly because of the plethora of ads on that particular New York Times article, I missed the last couple of paragraphs.

The item ends with a strong suggestion that Ray Bradbury (ergo F451) is next up on Amazon's mash-ups and revisions list!!!

You need to watch out if you employ a service to find books for you they don't try to stick you with a crappy fake POD copy.