Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
A Statement From Alan Kaufman, author of 'THE ELECTRONIC BOOKBURNING' To MY Mobile Read Critics ( http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html)
STATEMENT
We are slowly dissolving in a catastrophe of blandness. A stainless steel tableau of screen-mummified generic looking clone people placidly seated in the sun on perfect lawns of Astroturf, gaping at laptops and ipods and Blackberries. A fear-constricted world painted in the fading pastels of distraction- benumbed senses. A world in which fewer and fewer people bother to read books that engage you. I don't mean Harry Potter or James Patterson. I mean The Brothers Karamazov. I mean Madame Bovary, Sound and Fury, War and Peace, Bleak House. . A world in which corporate-driven electronic internet promotors, with the smug certainty of the true believer, and the sort of determination incited by the smell of money, have launched a savage assault against the book, feverishly working to find a replacement for the physical artifact, performing massive legalistic maneuvers on a war-sized scale to outflank author rights while driving in upon the print matter culture itself, book publishing, newspapers, magazines, in a concerted campaign to render them obsolete, transfer all reading material to the internet, and socially condition humanity, beginning in their earliest youth, to prefer technologically driven experience over human interface.
We in America are now trained not only to favor devices over the book but to prefer them to reality itself, so that en masse we now spend the majority of our lives seated before screens, staring and surfing, typing and gaming, twittering and viewing, punching keys, pressing buttons. We who are manipulating the mouse that confers upon us the illusion of supreme control are ourselves the
mice.
Naked reality without these buttons to press seems virtually unimaginable, even unlivable to most people today. In point of fact, a decision not to engage with electronic technology guarantees ones exile to a Devil's island of chilling isolation . Ia a world where everyone communicates through Facebook, twitter, blackberries, laptops, MySpace, to decide not to engage is to move in a deaf and dumb zone of uncommunicative zombies mesmerized by the visual stunts of the latest app and disinclined whatsoever to even note your existence.
What is this world we are making, in whch writers, now are told by the culture that they must beg at the internet portal for their existence? What is this world in which anyone with an arsenal of one hundred words may declare oneself an author by signing on for a blog, sprucing it up with graphics and pontificating about what they had for breakfast and what they think of Britney Spears? You have been cookie-cut by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Kindle and you don't even know it to dwell in a technological eternal sunshine of the
inflated ego.
Many have called this a Gutenberg moment, a global paradigm shift akin to that which occurred with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent transfer of knowledge to the average man.
But this is not a Gutenberg moment: it is a Nuremberg moment--a linguistic and cultural mass murder of the human mind; an economic Krystallnacht against the book, book culture, literacy and human freedom. We are witness to the ghettoization and deportation of our language and literature to the internet,where it will surely perish. No, there are no visible brown shirts posted outside the bookstores that have shut down all across the U.S. But our national illiteracy rate is now at 25% and climbing. The corporations are producing a generatiton of machine-addicted barbarians. The efforts of techno-fascists to make the Book into the reviled Jew of our culture is no less insidious then the campaign waged in WWII by Nazi Germany against my people, the Jewish People, the People of the Book, and I say this as a child of a Holocaust survivor, sensitive to the horrors that such allusions summon and not lightly given to make such comparisons.
I cannot forget what the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people. When I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 I see a population losing its humanness, individuality and character; becoming socially-condition drones of distant hidden invisible greed-driven Corporate Gauleiters and Furers. And as we watch the Orwellian electronic book burning underway across this nation, the plummeting of the American mind into ignorance and addiction, we may well wonder what form of efficient demonic technology will next be used, not to indoctrinate but to incinerate our illiterate bodies and those of our children and their children in the coming collective burnings on behalf of the emerging Corporate State. |
Dear Alan,
May I call you Alan? (I don't know for sure, but it somehow seems presumptuous of me to call you "Mr. Kaufman" - I don't know you well enough. )
I own a PRS-500, Cybook Gen3, Kindle 2, Axim x51v, Gateway 5628(desktop), Mini 12 (netbook) and iPod Touch. I *also* own over 900 mass-market paperback and 200 hardcover novels as well as over 300 technical and other non-fiction works. On my primary electronic readers, the Kindle and Cybook, I have three Charles Dickens works - including "Bleak House" - one by Victor Hugo, one Hawthorne, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and, of course, Ayn Rand's, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" - all of which I find so appealing that I keep them there permanently so I can go back and re-read favorite chapters. I've read "Atlas Shrugged" over 20 times since I got a copy in ebook format.
The electronic readers, I have found, make it *MORE* likely I'll read and re-read the classics *because* I can keep them to hand no matter when or where I am. Am I stuck in the waiting room for over two hours waiting to be called to see my primary care physician and I find I've finished the contemporary novel I was reading? No problem, break out "A Tale of Two Cities". Must I hang around with distant relatives who're more interested in the outcome of the Raider's game? (Let's face facts, this year is a "can we hang them from the highest yardarm", year.) I can delve deep into John Galt's milleau, so quietly that no one notices I've withdrawn from audio-visual overload. Or I can drop into the latest edition of Beginner's Guide to Java.
As I need two canes to walk, carrying all the books I can stuff on my K2 or Gen3 would be a physical impossibility. Not only that, but if I simply *must* enter a 'public' building, it is far easier to whip out the ereader than to attempt to smuggle five or ten books through the metal-detectors. (Yes, my relatives also find this a 'good thing' for overcoming travel boredom on long flights - almost anyone can tell you horror stories of on-screen movies designed to create madness and depression.)
While it is true that those who 'live to twitter' tend to not want to bog down in lengthy descriptions or involved dialogues, the real readers out there who actually give ebook readers a chance find most often that they make the process of reading more enjoyable, not less.
As for the grasping greediness of publishers, that has always been the case - even in the epoch of dead-tree publishing. And I have no pity for most independent bookstores. They saw the trends of online marketing and electronic books coming and refused to adapt. At the very least, they could have jumped right into creating an online marketing presence. Most of them chose not to.
One of the biggest faults I found was their refusal to make their (the ones local to Sacramento, California) stores ADA compliant so I could navigate the stacks in my mobility scooter. I am an *AVID* reader, consuming even before the advent of dedicated electronic book readers, more than 20 mid-list novels per month. When I found myself forced to use a mobility scooter, I also found myself shut out of nearly all the local independent bookstores. My *money* wasn't wanted enough for them to create accessibility for me. Fine. At that point I shifted to Barnes & Noble and Amazon for their online shopping and never looked back.
What I read, Alan, from you is a whiney rant complaining that we're just not being compliant-enough useful idiots who'll put up with the rigid (dare we say nearly totalitarian) rules you'd have us follow in order to keep your fantasy of 'how it ought to be' alive. Yeah, right. That's far more in keeping with the rigidity of thought required in Fahrenheit 451 than the real situation of the public (customers/consumers) determining what the publishers (suppliers) better darned well supply!
And while *you* may not deign to read the latest Patterson, Griffin, Haig, Ringo or Weber, I note that those authors - who've advanced in learning enough to grasp Hayekian economics - *are* making a living.
Yes, there will always be those authors who so STUN the ivory-tower New York publishing elite as to guarantee that those same publishers will foist such crap onto the public despite the mediocrity of the storytelling. However, most truly successful authors have figured out that most *readers* want to read books that actually TELL a story. You might try such a novel approach in your next novel rather than expressing opinions that have no basis in reality. Well, come to think of it, is that not the base for writing poetry?
BTW, yes, I get that you've written "Matches". And it may well be a good story, but given your attitude about everything electronics, I am now one sale you'll never make. Life's a beach and then you fall off the NYT Bestseller's list.
Derek