This is explicitly censorship. Film censorship boards would demand cuts and sometimes reshoots of particular parts of a film before they would allow its release. Censors of literary works, when those still existed, would do the same. Cuts or rewrites of parts of a literary work that they would not otherwise allow to be published.

Puffin/Netflix are censoring the works they have acquired the rights to. They are not allowing republication of the author's original works (they hold the rights and are the only party allowed to republish). They are cutting and rewriting the original author's book for new editions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security”. This is censorship.

This is how of books were censored in the USSR. Or how the Chinese censor the Bible (in their version Jesus picks up the first stone to start a stoning)

Difference is the Soviet had the honesty to censor while the author was alive.

You are correct, it's not censorship. It's lying, fabricating a past that is more in line with the present. Creating a false consensus on modern sensibilities using the voices of dead authors.

Your mention of translation is apt - it often is used as a fig leaf for exactly this kind of deception. They call it "localization", and defend it by offering a false dichotomy between it, and literal word-for-word translation.

But in this case they don't even have that thin excuse to hide behind.

Meh. I still think you're just inventing Political Enemies Propagating Horrific Injustice when the simpler explanation is a publisher trying to sell more books. The kinds of edits here simply aren't consistent with the ideas you're trying to ascribe to them. It's just updating stuff like "jobs women do" to match modern standards. It's routine, and it doesn't change the art, and you know that.

It's just dumb. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, and we'd all be happier if people would stop with all the one-sided hyperbole. It's exhausting.

> you're just inventing Political Enemies Propagating Horrific Injustice when the simpler explanation is a publisher trying to sell more books.

I only described their actions. You're talking about motivation. Though the publisher's motivation matters little when it's the "sensitivity readers" doing all the changes.

FWIW: the "sensitive" people seem to be your cohort, no? Most of us just Don't Care. It's a dumb thing, but it's not a genuine affront to real fans of the art either. I mean, be real: have you actually read Matilda or The BFG to an actual child?

If you didn't care, you wouldn't be commenting here, and you also insult another Hackernews User over "caring".

Do you actually understand your own emotional reaction or are you trying to use a gross rhetorical trick here ?

I'd like to see any proof original would have worse sales than the edit

You can try to redefine the words into whatever you think is right or wrong, but it doesn't make it true, and a very large amount of people disagree with you.