The Great Gapsby? How modern editions of classics lost the plot

This, unfortunately, is one reason why there's such a healthy trade in older used books.

There are other interesting reasons to flee to old books. For example, the 11th edition of Britannica for encyclopedia aficionados (reputedly the seed from which Wikipedia grew), 1913 Webster's (mentioned on HN in the last few weeks/months), and some works that people don't want to print today (the best example of this I know is Foreign Children by RL Stevenson, which tends to silently disappear for entirely understandable [0] reasons.)

[0]https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/foreign_chi...

Some years back, I bought a book on-line. It proved to have been OCRed & not checked. The release notice from Widener Library appeared at the bottom of the last essay. If one goes to an on-line vendor and enters the name of any author, however obscure, one will see a row of books in matching trade dress. I am confident that they do not represent any current physical object, but rather a plant to instantly print a comparably bad edition.

NFT fixes this