The only thing they are is truly, truly wonderful.
The Bible is I daresay the most famous of these. Translations aside, even the English versions have had significant alterations done to wording, spelling, and meaning depending on the version.
There's also the Great Illustrated Classics imprint for certain classic novels like H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man. (I read that one like 10 times as a kid and it's what got me into sci-fi as a whole I'd argue. Haha.)
Whether these alternate versions are good or bad is obviously up for debate and depends on the person, but I'm just saying that what SE does is hardly new in the publishing world.
I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.
Curious. Why even bother?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359
The edit is still in place, and I still maintain that changing 'phone to phone in dialogue changes the meaning.
When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.