How we prepare revised editions

Why we revise older books

We want readers and listeners to understand valuable Christian books whose language can be difficult today. Just as a translation needs to be accurate and readable, a revision must be faithful to the original work, not merely easier to read. Clearer words do little good if they change an author's meaning or theology.

We would love to have the resources to hire skilled human editors to prepare every revised edition. We value the careful work of Banner of Truth and other publishers and ministries. Preparing each book by hand from beginning to end with a paid editorial team is beyond our present resources, yet we want to make more of these books accessible while keeping our audiobooks free.

How the work is done

We wrestle with how to use technology responsibly to make these works more accessible. The careful work of human editors cannot simply be replaced by AI. For many of our revised editions, an AI tool prepares a first draft in more accessible English from an older work. A person at Scroll Reader then reads or listens through the full draft and makes corrections and edits before publication. We credit the original author and aim to preserve the work's substance and theology. The extent of modernization and the source edition can differ from book to book; the note inside each edition should explain that book's actual preparation.

This is an editorial process, not a claim that every sentence was written by a human or checked by a professional editorial team. AI can introduce errors or shift a nuance, and human review can miss things.

What “revised” means for readers

A modern-language revision is not a verbatim transcription of the older text. If you need an author's exact wording for quotation or close study, consult the original source edition as well. Not every audiobook on Scroll Reader has revised wording: the choice of a human or synthetic narrator is separate from whether the text has been revised.