Messing up in the workplace is never a pleasant sensation, but the very worst kind of boo-boo is the silent-but-deadly variety: a dizzyingly serious error you realise you've committed long before anyone else.

First comes the awful moment of realisation. In this instant, you're the loneliest person in the world. As the scale of your cock-up sinks in, you feel a cold egg of dread being cracked open over your skull, its chilled albumen seeping down your temples, the icy yolk quivering atop your crown like the frozen cherry on a tortured metaphor. This is followed by a brief period of indignant disbelief: how dare the Gods of Fate allow such a terrible thing to happen to a nice person like you, the idiots?

This defensive psychological distancing lasts about 19 seconds, before being swept away by a burst of intense self-recrimination, during which you feel like pulling your own brain out and spanking it over your knee. And then finally, an unreal calm takes hold while you weigh up your options: will you immediately own up (the honourable thing to do, although you could get fired)? Or will you slyly wait, you snake, to see how things pan out, in the hope that maybe – just maybe – you'll dodge the culpability-bomb when it all comes to light?

Maybe they'll mistakenly blame Tom. You know Tom. Nice bloke. Works hard. Keeps his head down. Recently became a dad for the first time. Hope they sack the shit out of him.

Presumably, a similar scenario played out in someone's mind last week, when it transpired that 80,000 copies of the wrong draft of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom – a 576-page whopper, hailed by some critics as a masterpiece – had inadvertently been printed, bound and distributed. Someone, it seems, had picked up the wrong digital file of the book.

At first glance, this looks like an almighty disaster, albeit an understandable one. Like anyone who's ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I'm writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as FINALSCRIPT2a.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1b-IGNORE-ALL-OTHERS-AND-USE-THIS.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1c- I-AM-SPARTACUS.DOC.

Sometimes the documents themselves are radically different; sometimes the differences consist of a few missing commas here and there. Disappointingly, it seems the disparity between the "right" and "wrong" drafts of Franzen's book chiefly consists of minor typographical errors and typesetting changes. It'd be far more interesting if they'd accidentally printed a version in which, halfway through the 19th chapter, the whole thing ends abruptly with the words MORE BOOK TO GO HERE. But that didn't happen.

Early drafts are rougher and baggier and less disciplined than the polished final product, but can be more entertaining as a result. For instance, the first draft of the children's classic Mr Tickle is rumoured to climax with the hitherto cheery long-armed orange blobman horrifically molesting a cow from the other side of a duckpond, just because he can. Also, the original cut of Ridley Scott's recent retelling of the Robin Hood legend contained a puzzling interlude during which Russell Crowe recited the URL for a pornographic website. The scene was dropped from the theatrical release at the last minute when it was discovered that a script supervisor had inadvertently pasted the contents of their clipboard into the script while trying to find the keyboard shortcut for "print". Neither of these stories is true, incidentally, but that doesn't necessarily make recounting them here any less worthwhile.

I'm assuming the Franzen error doesn't affect readers who bought digital copies of the novel to read on Kindles and iPhones and eReaders and the like – but then again, even if it did, it should be possible to remotely and automatically update them all without anyone really noticing. In fact, the advent of digital books blurs the whole notion of "final drafts" and "revised editions" into a confusing futuristic smudge. Freed from the physical limitations of a paper-and-ink edition, authors can continue tinkering with the text way beyond the date of publication, maybe even for ever. Perhaps before too long, you'll be midway through an especially underwhelming paragraph, and it'll start deleting itself before your very eyes, just like this one should have. Or your favourite character will die or reappear under an assumed name and have sex with themselves. Any notion of permanence will be a thing of the past. Even the individual letters will crawl around while you look at them, like agitated ants.

Worst of all, without the crushing finality of a concrete deadline looming over them, authors won't be forced to make up their minds about anything any more, and before long all books will open like this: "James Bond strode into the casino. Actually, no he didn't. He walked into a blazing warehouse. Except he wasn't on foot. He was in a car. Or on a horse. Whatever. The important thing is, it was all really exciting."

MORE COLUMN TO GO HERE.