I have a large book collection (somewhere between 4-5000 volumes). I never adopted Kindle or other e-book formats. Seems to me that the true “owner” of the electronic book can alter the content anytime he wants. I imagine that in the future, electronic copies of, say, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” will contain no questionable terminology when referring to Jim the escaped slave. In contrast, the printed page is a safe bet — it says what it is meant to say.
Huckleberry Finn would be a much weaker novel without Huck’s constant use of the pejorative “N” word. It’s the whole point of it. He grew up believing that slavery was good, blacks were subhuman, and listening to his father’s drunken rants about “n—ers,” and he believes that he is doing something unsavory by helping Jim gain his freedom, even while doing everything he can to help.
But in the end, the goodness of Jim, how he grieves for mistreating his daughter ‘til he realized she was deaf and didn’t hear his command, and how kind he was to Huck himself, in contradistinction to his father, who chased him around with a knife and constantly whipped him, for daring to learn how to read and putting on frills, or just being there when he felt like whipping somebody, so that at the very end of the book, Huck refers to Jim as a “good man,” finally seeing his humanity. But the woke idiots would Bowdler-ize the greatest novel ever written, the second-best being Alone in Berlin by Hans Falada. I wonder what they’d cut out of that one.