I have made the PDF diff, too. The changes are numerous and very … petty.
It seems those changes are driven by a very negative, toxic, even racist viewpoint that considers not only some colorful words like “exotic” to become “evil”, but also leads to cutting actual information.
An example would be, cutting the fact that on the Lotus Road the main trade is in DRUGS. This got cut away, left off.
But why?
In this fantasy setting, in this region of a fantasy world, the people there are dealing in the fantasy drug of Lotus in its different forms.
Why would that be considered somehow “politically inacceptible”?
If the trade in drugs from the exotic east is inacceptible, wouldn’t that be even more the case regarding the trade in slaves?
Shouldn’t, by applying the same kind of - weird and irrational - “logic”, all other for modern day political considerations regarded “risky” or “insensitive” facts be cut out of the Conan books?
That would, of course, mean reworking the already published ones,too.
You know, the ones with slaves and slavery and even slave hunters as character archetypes.
What happened here with Conan the Wanderer was several steps too far.
This damages the product and even the whole product line.
One can be very sceptical about the quality of content in the still many books to come in the following waves.
I consider this reworking of Conan the Wanderer and possible future books a very insensitive mistake.