[Elfwreck]

I'm gonna try to pretend this is serious. Really. This is my not giggling-out-loud voice; see the lack of kicking and laughing smiley. This'd be *so* easy to satirize, and I'd really rather focus on the serious claims.

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.

Erudite attention-grabbing scare tactics: Check. I'll be clipping out further examples.

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.

Those books may engage you, sir, but they are not overly relevant to my life. Out of all the history of literature, you picked... five books written by White Christian men.

Indeed, their time of dominating the intellectual world is being severely challenged by the internet. I'm not seeing this as a bad thing.

A world in which corporate-driven electronic internet promotors,

Erm. The hardcore internet promoters are not corporate-driven. Quite the opposite. Copyfight activists struggle to create nonprofit orgs that own their own servers, to be able to stand up against corporations.

with the smug certainty of the true believer, and the sort of determination incited by the smell of money,

Erm... who, exactly, is profiting from the ebooks that have been bouncing around on Usenet for the last fifteen years or so?

have launched a savage assault against the book, feverishly working to find a replacement for the physical artifact,

Not replacement. Supplement. In the way that printed books were supplements to calligraphed books, and filled a niche that the older, more artistic form could not fill. The same way that photography supplemented painted portraits. And as with hand-written books, the new form will likely surpass the old until it eventually becomes either a quaint artistic hobby, or an archivist's object.

But painting didn't vanish when photography became the common way of sharing images of people. Books will not vanish because e-texts become the standard way of storing novels. The book *industries*, OTOH, are in serious danger.

to outflank author rights

The right to make 20% of sale price, not list price, on ebooks, mandatory with the agreement to publish physically?

The ebook advocates aren't the ones making it hard for authors to make a living at their craft.

while driving in upon the print matter culture itself, book publishing, newspapers, magazines, in a concerted campaign to render them obsolete,

Don't mistake a singularity for a campaign. The current publishing industries were doomed when the first email was sent... the only issues are how long it will take, and what industries will rise in their wake.

transfer all reading material to the internet,

Copy, not transfer. Nobody's advocating getting rid of existing paper archives.

and socially condition humanity, beginning in their earliest youth, to prefer technologically driven experience over human interface.

In what way is a book "human interface?"
I've had a lot more contact with authors of ebooks than with authors of physical books I've read.

We in America are now trained not only to favor devices over the book

In case you forgot: the book is a device. It's what you use when you don't have a person in front of you to tell you a story, explain how physics works, or give you a list of phone numbers for people whose last names begin with "FRA..."

Battery-op devices are no less unnatural than ink-on-paper devices. Neither would exist without a lot of human industry.

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.

It is not, for the most part, the ebook readers who are spending 60 hours a week Warcrafting or Tweeting. In fact, ebook readers are kinda stuck *not* doing those things, because reading and websurfing don't combine well.

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

I notice you don't mention landline phones in your collection of zombie-making electronic devices. And you're not grumbling about how television has convinced people not to spend time with their friends and family. Nor how automobiles, those collections of buttons and levers and dials, have destroyed communities.

Hmm. Old tech is safe; new tech is soul-sucking?

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?

Are authors afraid those blogs will steal their readers? That if the public has *free choice* of content, they won't choose to pay for literary works, but will instead prefer gossip and lolcats?

Surprise, surprise. The public likes mindless entertainment more than the publishing industry wants to admit.

(Special side-note: the "drabble" is a form of fanfiction that's exactly 100 words long. It's been described as "fannish haiku." It takes talent to put a real story into exactly 100 words. Of course, the mainstream publishing industries don't deal with that, because even setting aside the derivative/transformative issue of fanfiction, there's no way to make a profit selling 100-word stories, unless you put a *huge* number of them in a book, and then they get overwhelmed by numbers. Mainstream publishing has no room for literary art in tiny pieces, but the internet has made it possible to be appreciated.)

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.

Somewhere on the internet, an Ubuntu programmer is laughing his head off. Because of course, when you talk about "techno-evils," you talk about the corporations that are making millions from them--not the open-source backbone of the hacker's culture from which they grew.

But this is not a Gutenberg moment: it is a Nuremberg moment

Aaaaand we have Godwin-sign!

--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.

Because making it available to everyone, for free, will surely kill it.

That term, "ghettoization," is telling. Culture, he says, is for the elite, for those with taste and refinement enough to appreciate it. Not for the impoverished and barely-English-speaking peoples. Not for those whose lifestyles don't lean towards appreciation of "classics" written and touted by White, upper-class, Christian men.

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.

Source, please?

And funny how you blame the internet for that, rather than the public school policies that pass children to the next grade regardless of academic achievement.

SNIP: "the holocaust of pbooks" paragraph. Please, sir, stop; my eyes can't handle any more rolling.

I cannot forget what the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people.

Sure. And, umm... by sharing books easily, by making them accessible to people whose eyes can't handle tiny print or whose hands shake too much to turn pages without tearing them, we are "burning" them? By transferring them from one reader to another, across the country, in seconds, we are destroying them?

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.

As someone with two children who move smoothly between reading paper and pixels--you have no idea what you're talking about.

"Demonic" technology? Is that the communication technology that makes 911 operators able to dispatch an ambulance in seconds? The microengineering technology that makes cameras to be swallowed to check for cancer symptoms? The information technology that makes weather forecasts available to anyone with access to the web?

Or is it only "demonic" when you become aware how little interest most people have in the culture you thought should be the dominant one forever? When you have to face the reality that raw, unfiltered creativity, even the trite and simplistic forms, are fascinating to millions of people? When you acknowledge that 140 characters is enough, most of the time, to say what needs to be said?

Books aren't in any danger. Books are growing like weeds. Word-based communication is exploding all over the place. It's the paper-pushing industries that are going into their death throes.