Ctrl-F —

Nook version of War and Peace turns the word “kindled” into “Nookd”

Tolstoy's text victimized by modern technology, laziness.

In one of the truly bizarre incidents we've seen out of the e-book publishing world, a translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for Barnes & Noble's Nook platform has replaced all mentions of the word "kindled" with "Nookd."

It appears to be a case of Ctrl-F gone wrong. An astute reader named Philip broke the story on his blog, noting that his reading of the classic was interrupted by the sentence "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern…" The blogger noticed more and more uses of the word "Nookd," leading him to examine a paper copy to find a more accurate translation that used the word "kindled" instead.

The best explanation, we think, comes from a commenter on the blog, who says "This obviously wasn't done by Barnes & Noble, but by the publisher who submitted the book to Barnes & Noble. They created a Kindle version of this public domain book first, realized they used 'Kindle' somewhere in their submission, and did a quick find-and-replace to change 'Kindle' to 'Nook'—never once thinking it would affect the book's text rather than just whatever they put in the title page."

Another blog post by Jonathan Zittrain, author of "The Future of the Internet and how to stop it," and Berkman Center research associate Kendra Albert, comes to a similar conclusion, noting that the "Nookd" version of War and Peace comes from a company called Superior Formatting Publishing.

We found eight mentions of the word "nookd" after downloading the e-book, as you can see here:

This wording kindles our interest...
Enlarge / This wording kindles our interest...

While we hate to see the text of a great writer like Tolstoy sullied by such silliness, at least it wasn't intentional (unlike that little incident involving the Amazon Kindle and George Orwell's 1984).

43 Reader Comments

  1. Love the references to Orwell...

    This is just weak--but also reveals the sorry state of editing. Enough of the e-books I have read over the past year and a half often look like little editing was done--from minor issues like added hyphens (presumably to fix an odd line break in the paper layout), to bizarre OCR mistranslations.

    Shows us where their priorities are...
    853 posts | registered
  2. This sounds like a fiendish plot by Dr. Nonookie of Leisure Suit Larry fame.
    1 post | registered
  3. Xavin wrote:
    This is pretty unsurprising, lots of companies try to make a quick buck by selling public domain works, and the ebook conversion is almost universally horrible.


    If it only it was something reserved to public domain works. I've bought several commercial titles that were full of obvious typos a single read-through would have identified.
    545 posts | registered
  4. 1216 posts | registered

You must to comment.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/nook-version-of-war-and-peace-turns-the-word-kindled-into-nookd/?comments=1&start=40
arstechnica.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-50
53519
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:3VUMOSBMCKEDHD5MG2BYC3HJTELVYCKO
<urn:uuid:c4ed22fa-1cea-4cea-8047-c9d418e778f4>
2016-12-10T22:33:16Z
50.31.151.33
sha1:NLQRBWST7AQXUUAF56F5GIZYYTP4BXJ5
<urn:uuid:fd6fea05-534f-4a50-b762-026ead71c0eb>
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/nook-version-of-war-and-peace-turns-the-word-kindled-into-nookd/?comments=1&start=40
length
response
<urn:uuid:4248d7f1-0239-4815-b9d3-22a436a9332c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-31-129-80.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-50
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf