The weekend of my 8th birthday (1977), my mom took my sister, one of my sister’s friends, and me to see Star Wars at a drive-in theater.
It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen — particularly the cantina scene, where we meet Han Solo. In that scene, Han chats with Greedo, a bounty hunter who thinks he has Han trapped. Han shoots Greedo instead of being hauled in. Don’t believe me, watch the video above.
When the Star Wars movies were re-released, director George Lucas changed things. In later editions, Greedo shoots first:
I’ve heard many an argument from Star Wars fans about this change, and I know that to go there is a slide into the Sarlac Pit of geekdom. I don’t want to talk about who shot first (because we all know Han did!) — I want to talk about e-books.
What Does Han Shooting First Have to Do with E-Books?
For the majority of time stories have been published, content didn’t change. Books were printed, and many of them may as well have been printed on stone. If an author wanted to go back and change something, they were usually out of luck. Generally, only popular books meriting reprints were altered, and the books that saw changes were usually non-fiction, with updated or additional information used as a selling point.
With E-Books, That’s Changed
With an e-book, if I write a story about a bounty hunter trying to haul a smuggler to a giant slug-of-a-gangster for payment, and I have the smuggler shoot the bounty hunter in the first edition and decide to change my mind, I can now update the story almost instantly. All it takes is changing the scene, exporting my file, and alerting Amazon and Barnes and Noble about the change so they can push the new edition to people who’ve bought my e-book.
I can now make Greedo shoot first with even less effort than it takes George Lucas and a team of artists and editors!
A Strength of E-Books
I have a free short story people can read right here. It’s a story I’ve always liked, but the ending was always kind of abrupt — I was never completely satisfied with it. Then one day as I was driving some back roads and thinking, the ending I wanted all along hit me. (It was also on a back road that this blog idea hit me — driving in the country is good for ideas). I updated the file and created a new PDF.
If I want to change Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors, I can, and people would get the updated file. If I want to add an afterword that’s the book equivalent of bonus features on a DVD, I can do it. For non-fiction e-books that contain information that changes frequently, e-books allow the person or publisher releasing the book to keep things current.
That’s not always the case with printed books.
Printed Books vs. E-Books
Imagine I’m a publisher with a print edition and an e-book edition of the same story or information out there. Unless I’ve sold many printed books, I’m not going to reprint. Even if I do reprint, content often doesn’t change because it costs money to make changes with a printed book. But with the e-book, I can change things every week. (Not that I suggest changing things frequently — it’s probably a good way to annoy readers.)
If I’ve released a book that contains lists of links to websites or other information that changes frequently, my e-book stays current while the printed book becomes dated. While I’m not sure if that’s a strength or an annoyance (it could be either), the ability to update a digital book much easier than a printed copy definitely has its appeal.
Even if the printed book sells well, chances are the information or story isn’t going to change, even in a reprint. But with the digital version — even if there aren’t hordes of readers — I can easily make Greedo shoot first.
Reading this, I’m reminded of a phrase: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
I like the idea of fixing editing mistakes, gross misspellings and the like, without having to pull all the print copies from the shelves and lay the updates on new dead trees. These are the types of things that can disrupt the flow of the story and even take the reader all the way out of it and back to reality. But, I do take issue with using this power to substantially change a story I love and then automatically sending that update down to me. This, in effect, kills the story I loved in favor of the updated version.
With Greedo, many of us still own the DVD copies of the original and we can go back to that if we want. With the subscription model used by eBooks, we aren’t afforded that option. I’m not advocating going to a release system with Readme.txt files describing a log of the changes or anything like that. The convenience of auto-updating for editing mistakes is too valuable. But, perhaps authors need to exercise some discernment on what types of edits one can make after publication.
The Greedo example is telling. No one objected to updating the film with advanced visual effects. OK, maybe not no one, but certainly less people had a problem with it than Greedo shooting first. Why?
To me it is obvious. The updated visual effects help keep the reader in the story. The dated nature of the visual effects could detract in much the same way as a misspelled word to someone approaching the movies for the first time. But, the change to Greedo and Han’s scene altered a significant developmental element of Han’s character. Who Han *IS* as a character was changed by that that edit. This is the core issue.
So authors, listen to Uncle Ben.
I definitely agree, Larry. With the stories I’ve released as e-books, the only changes I can ever think of making are, “Whoops! How did that typo get by editing?” and things along those lines. Em dashes that didn’t transfer correctly; things of that nature. (Now that I have a Kindle and can review e-books more conveniently before publishing, hopefully that won’t be an issue.) For me, altering the story isn’t an option. But it’s something I thought about driving along this weekend.
I know some authors who take a look at older writing and want to change it. It’s one thing if it’s an old story sitting on your hard drive and you want to finally do something with it, but if it’s already out there and — like you said — is something people like…leave it alone. Even if it irks the hell out of you.
When I released Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors, I cleaned up some of the punctuation and things along those lines, but I didn’t rewrite it because some people had already read it. There are things I’d love to change, but I know my time as a writer is always best spent moving forward, not trying to perfect something from the past.
If I suddenly had a change of feelings and thought Mary was too crude a character and made her nicer and toned down her language, it would take something from the people who love her. As you point out, George Lucas changed an aspect of Han’s character in that scene.
Seeing stormtroopers on dewbacks is one thing, but changing a character is another 😉
But… you can also do cool stuff like “Special Editions,” like a DVD with more extra features. The first 47 Echo book included a bunch of short stories from guest authors — the released book did not. If my publisher wanted to, they could add these back in and make 47 Echo: SE.
And that’s a cool idea to me.
And Han did shoot first. Always.
Shawn: Yep, I like the idea of additional content, like bonus features. The paperback version of Larry Doyle’s I Love You, Beth Cooper contains an interview, essays by fans of the book…things like that. While I left Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors alone and plan to keep it that way, the thought of extra features added in a run-up to summer road trip season appeals to me. It can be a way as a self publisher to see a second life for a book with people who don’t know it exists, and give fans of the book additional content.
Short stories from guest authors, interviews, and even author’s notes and thoughts about writing certain things–I love that kind of stuff. It’s a rare case that something like I Love You Beth Cooper is released with the literary equivalent of DVD Bonus Features, but it was cool to read about his time writing for the Simpsons and some of the essays that were chosen for inclusion. None of it detracted from the story–that was left alone. Writing this, I really need to think of bonus features for HCWWPD 😉