No, the motive is ideology, not money. This way ensures almost universal replacement.
The default user action is null. If they had the new one released separately, nobody would have purchased it. By replacing the old one, few will buy the original.
The bleaching will be much more complete this way.
>If they had the new one released separately, nobody would have purchased it.
This is true, and they wouldn't have wanted to do that, not least because it would reflect poorly on the changes, but this would have been an alternative honest way to have released the new editions had they wished to, in contrast to what they actually did.
It's a grift, the Sensitivity readers whip up backlash to anything remotely offensive and then sell the "Cure" to any company Stupid enough to listen to a loud minority on twitter.
Everyone knows demand For his books was going nowhere, the only change is these new people pretending they're the arbiters of everything proper and polite. Wasn't a fan of churchy nobodies telling me what media I shouldn't consume, nor will I kowtow to a bunch of Otherwise irrelevant art graduates.
The True Believers of Wokeness^tm are now completely sidelined and we're in the feeding frenzy stage of the fad. Wizards of the Coast cash grab for D&D was the first time that I was someone _completely_ transparently trying to fleece their customers while being draped in a rainbow.
They were, but it's now hip to blame 'wokeness' for the horse bolting out the barndoor, the milk going bad, and other similar calamities, like rains of frogs, poor stock performance relative to the S&P500, and so on, and so forth.
>When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products. Second, we wanted to address those attempting to use D&D in web3, blockchain games, and NFTs by making clear that OGL content is limited to tabletop roleplaying content like campaigns, modules, and supplements. And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.
I'm not sure that link says what you think it does.
The very first sentence in the 'what's next' part of that post starts out, "The next OGL will contain the provisions that allow us to protect and cultivate the inclusive environment we are trying to build"
So sounds to me like they're doubling down on the ideology while relaxing (at least some of) the licensing terms.
Unless you shorten it to low single digits (which would be nice, but so are unicorns) you'd still want a way to make things available that the original author no longer has a commercial interest in. It doesn't benefit society to make things unvailable, even if it is "only" for 10 or 20 years.
>No, the motive is ideology, not money. This way ensures almost universal replacement.
It isn't an either/or situation. Seems likely they are motivated by both money and ideology. If it was purely money they could retroactively censor existing books without offering the original version at all (which would cost them money).
>That doesn't make sense, how would that make them money?
They are retroactively altering/censoring the books that people have already purchased, and offering the original uncensored version as a new purchase.
>Secondly, as these are e-books, how would releasing copies of the originals cost them money?
They are not "releasing" copies of the originals, they are selling them for money. People who bought these books as originally written are now going to be forced to pay more money in order to revert their purchases to the original, uncorrupted version.
> They are retroactively altering/censoring the books that people have already purchased, and offering the original uncensored version as a new purchase.
But that wasn't what was said, unless it was a typo.
> > If it was purely money they could retroactively censor existing books without offering the original version at all
Implying that they wouldn't offer the originals if it was all about money. That was what I meant by "that doesn't make sense". It sounds like you agree so it was just miscommunication.
> People who bought these books as originally written are now going to be forced to pay more money in order to revert their purchases to the original, uncorrupted version.
You originally said it would cost the publishers money, which is what I questioned. But again, I think we agree and this is just a language barrier.
What they have done is stupid and bad. But reducing it to "money or ideology" is a false dichotomy, there are other reasons that may have motivated their stupid choice, and it is probably a mix of all those.
If it is ideology, how do you explain that they changed a reference of Conrad to Austen?
A third option is that they acted clumsily in good faith by trying to keep the book up-to-date with the new generation. The fact that some people are offended and want so much believe into a culture war move tells more about these persons than the publishers.
But they did not replace other reference to a male character by a female one. In particular, in the same paragraph, they did not replace Hemingway and Kipling (who are way worst in the "woke circle").
I feel that this is a good example that everything can be shoe-horned into a "woke agenda". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and some people would have said "these woke had to switch to an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist".
If you read everything with the idea that there is a woke agenda, you will always find "reason" why what you observed is secretly part of the woke conspiracy.
The reference to Kipling was replaced by one to John Steinbeck, I assume because Steinbeck was a leftist, and Kipling is perceived to have been politically on the right (certainly he is relative to contemporary standards).
That's exactly what I'm saying: you are _assuming_ because you want to find a "woke agenda". On the other hand, Steinbeck is also an author that a contemporary Mathilda-like kid would read, while they would not read Kipling.
This is the problem here: it really looks like that the equivalently probable hypothesis that it's not a woke conspiracy is totally impossible to imagine for some people, and this is a problem: they are deep in their paranoia.
I don't know if the reason is that Steinbeck is leftist or not. It is even possible that it is a woke agenda reason. What is worrying is that some people are just wanting sooo much for it to be a woke agenda, and the problem is that you can always turn everything into a woke agenda. If they would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling, you would have said "it's because Kipling's books are talking about other cultures and Steinbeck talks about America, and for the wokes, it's bad to talk about America".
That being said, maybe I'm a bit biased, because so far, in a lot of cases, those moral panics turn out to be blown out of proportion: the "bad wokes threatening freedom" turn out to not defend the ideological position they are told they have. It may be the case here too: all this story may be just idiots who clumsily tried to keep the book relevant for what they think was the new taste.
they did not replaced Hemingway and Kipling BY A WOMAN. Sorry, I should have been clearer, but this sentence was completing the previous sentence.
At the end, it's basically what I'm saying: they replace Conrad by Austen, and one says "it's woke because they replace men by women", but they replace Kipling by Steinbeck, and one says "it's woke because they replace a man with a right ideology with a man with a left ideology". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and one would have said "it's woke because Conrad was anti-imperialist". They would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling and one would have said "it's woke because Kipling is more multicultural than america-centered Steinbeck".
Not just that. Conrad is pretty controversial these days in certain circles. Many people consider "Heart of Darkness" to be racist. I think another male author would have been passed over without remark.
But why did they choose the replace Conrad by Austen instead of replacing Hemingway or Kipling. Both Hemingway and Kipling are more controversial in certain circles (for Hemingway, cf. the Ken Burns' documentary, for Kipling, he is a jingo imperialist). As far as I know, critiques of Conrad were done in the 80's and never really stuck.
So, no, it does not make sense: if they wanted to remove someone controversial, they would have started with Kipling, then Hemingway, then Conrad.
The default user action is null. If they had the new one released separately, nobody would have purchased it. By replacing the old one, few will buy the original.
The bleaching will be much more complete this way.