On the other hand, other parents may well wish to have access to cherished stories from their childhood to read to their own children _without_ first having to re-read them all in advance and prepare their own annotated versions.

I'm not even necessarily agreeing with the publisher's approach here, but I can certainly see there being a market for "modernised" versions of older books that tired parents can relax into reading aloud as a bedtime story, without that constant low-level unease about the possibility of some dodgy dated stuff popping up out of nowhere.