Anyone who has read books for classes in high school and above knows that even classics are routinely fucked with by publishers. Even early in the work's history. I remember even in middle school someone would invariably end up with a different publisher's edition of a book for summer reading or whatnot and we'd find changes.
Unless the book is specifically declared to be the original text - and it may have to specify which original text - they're going to be edited.
However, in electronic form it should be possible to include both in one file, or two files with the original in a repo branch once all the document structure stuff has been added. That text will never change, so merging formatting-only changes should be pretty painless.
For every book, Standard Ebooks provides a hyperlink to the original scan, a hyperlink to the original transcription, and a full revision history in which all spelling updates have been clearly marked. To me, this already seems to be going above and beyond—most ebook repositories provide less. I can’t imagine that the marginal benefit from keeping multiple parallel branches would be worth the cost in volunteer time and labor, when maintaining pristine first editions isn’t even a goal of the project.
And of course, none of this matters in the slightest for translated works, which almost by definition includes the vast majority of works ever written.
"As it was written" is a very high bar that is simply not attainable for anything other than fairly recent works in your native language.
Unless the book is specifically declared to be the original text - and it may have to specify which original text - they're going to be edited.
However, in electronic form it should be possible to include both in one file, or two files with the original in a repo branch once all the document structure stuff has been added. That text will never change, so merging formatting-only changes should be pretty painless.