When "Find and Replace" Goes Wrong

Philip at Ocracoke Island Journal was reading War and Peace on an e-reader and marveling at how lightweight it made the heavy tome, when he found something peculiar.
As I was reading, I came across this sentence: "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern...." Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.

For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: "It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern...."

Someone at Barnes and Noble (a twenty year old employee? or maybe the CEO?) had substituted every incidence of "kindled" with "Nookd!"

Was is a nefarious effort in branding a certain e-reader at the expense of the other? Does it remind you of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which history was regularly re-edited? Is this the future of publishing? Probably not, as an anonymous commenter pointed out:
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.

Of course, the same mistake could go the other way, as "nook" is also a word used in literature now and again. Link -via Metafilter

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Obviously this was a result of ignorance. But we do see instances of deliberate changes to small details in books. I can think of one where the villain's first name is changed because it's the same as the main character's first name. It's a sort of dumbing down of the story, possibly to avoid confusion, but it also takes something - a connection between the two - away from the story.

And of course, there's the whole idea of taking a particular offensive word out of Huck Finn.
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There is no substitute for proofreading. My company had been sending out manuals that had search/replaced every "unit" with "instrument" and ended up with "Instrumented States of America" on the last page.
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TIP 1: Place a space at the end of the Find/Replace string so that only the stand-alone word or phrase is selected.

TIP 2: Step through the Find/Replace one at a time. This takes the place of fully proofreading.
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The other way around would be just a bit more amusing:
...she sat in the eating kindle, as...
There was a little kindle, just behind...
...were having a bit of kindley...

Perhaps this one would be pretty funny:
...with a lit match above a great pile of nook: ready to light the...
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