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I find it curious that editions give errata, rather than just fixing them in place, but I understand the whole "historical" thang, too.



The errata? Yeah. It's basically because in most cases there is confusion as to which was the final proof and which emendation of several different emendations on several different manuscripts Joyce would have approved of and so on.

One guy (German textual critic and English professor Walter Gabler, 1984) even published a version with two versions! The verso or left-hand pages of his Beijing-telephone-directory-sized tomb for a 'synoptic text' (a critically edited version in "compositional development" displayed by a system of diacritics) and the retro or right-hand pages displaying the "continuous reading text" resulting from an extrapolation without diacritics of the edition text.

Trust me, get the version with the errata.