Is it a derivative work of a book to says "Given an english copy of 'The Da Vinci Code' replace all occurrences of the word 'Jesus' with 'Dave'. In the current 20th printing of the english language version of the book you will find these on pages 1,4,6,..."

It is not. Telling someone how to run a process on a work to transform it is not breaching copyright in any way. If the person how transforms the work then distributes it, they will have a problem. But the person who told them how to transform it would not.