Like when Amazon removed Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindle devices silently? https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

Yeah that, only instead of removing it, they just spend a few decades turning it into an endorsement

Yeah like the Bearenstein bears, amirite?

They must have spent _years_ printing and aging copies of those books and destroying the originals. You have to admire the dedication

Wait, what is this? What happened?

It's a joke. The books are called The Berenstain Bears. Because surnames ending in -stain are extremely rare and surnames ending in -stein are fairly common, a lot of people misremember them as The Berenstein Bears.

This has spawned numerous conspiracy theories about the name changing. There is a group of people who seriously believe they've somehow travelled into a parallel universe where the only difference is that a children's book series is named differently. This theory is often referred to as "the Mandela Effect", which is named after how a lot of people mistakenly remember hearing about Nelson Mandela dying years before he actually did (and yes, these people claim that they've accidentally travelled to a parallel universe where the only difference is that Nelson Mandela lived another 15 years). The theory sounds like a joke, but its proponents take it dead seriously, and they've been known to start flamewars over it.

As such, a lot of people like to make fun of these conspiracy theories by concocting the most ludicrous theories we can think of.

Much better than I would have been able to explain it.

Is this referencing something that actually happened?

Calibre (unsupported) plugins let you remove DRM from Kindle books, so you actually can save a local copy not connected to Amazon in any way. I keep buying Kindle books while this is still possible, and will stop if it ceases to be.

be careful with sharing books you got with this method. The Calibre plugin does remove the DRM but not the Amazon User ID they embed inside. Keeping it for you is fine, otherwise you need to be more cautious.

I don't share books, I just store them in epub format so that I can read them in Marvin. But thanks for the heads up. Do you know if the Kindle user Id is saved in the epub file when converted with Calibre?

Is there currently a single source of truth for the content of books and other written media? Something like a hash of all the contents that can be stored in some indelible way (blockchain maybe?) so that as time passes people can verify that the content has remained the same?

Nope, but I imagine you could create one using something like the IPFS protocol: https://ipfs.io/

You mean the Automatic Book Updates feature on the Kindle?

No, I mean a super crazy conspiracy theory where Amazon changes the content of books to better fit some acquired set of political or ideological views

This is far more likely to happen in settlement of a libel suit, say. It doesn't require any conspiracy.

So… exactly what Amazon's automatic book update can do, just hasn't yet?