One of the downsides of reading an ebook can be finding weird formatting, spelling mistakes, and other things that got lost in the digital translation. However, word started going around last week about one of the more bizarre changes we've heard of — apparently, in the War and Peace on the Barnes and Noble Nook platform, every instance of the world "kindled" has been replaced with "nookd." Since "nookd" isn't a word as far as we can tell, it seems that someone was trying to remove references to Amazon's competing ebook platform from this fine piece of literature.
It appears this can't be blamed on Barnes and Noble, however — a post over at Hacker News from an individual who says he used to be on the Nook team notes that it isn't possible for the device software to change the text of a book. More likely is conversion service taking the text of the Kindle edition and doing a little find and replace for "Kindle" to "Nook." Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It, agrees, noting in a blog post that the offending ebook is a 99-cent version from Superior Formatting Publishing, who also published the book for Kindle. Removing the references to Amazon's competing product through find-and-replace appears to have changed more of the book than the publisher bargained for.