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Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
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Oh my. What a load of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twaddle.
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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.
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Ebooks and reading devices have dramatically increased my access to, and consumption of, classic, "worthwhile" literature. I'm sure this holds true for many, many others.
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transfer all reading material to the internet
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As many others have pointed out, you're completely missing the point. There is no "transfer of all reading material" going on. Any
duplication of books into electronic form is the very antithesis of book-burning - it greatly reduces the chances of the work being lost.
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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.
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Luddism, pure and simple.
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Naked reality without these buttons to press seems virtually unimaginable, even unlivable to most people today.
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Compare: "Naked reality, without
sanitation, antibiotics, printing, (add any technological advance) seems virtually unimaginable, even unliveable to most people today. "
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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?
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Compare: "What is this world we are making, in whch writers, now are told by the culture that they must beg at the
publishing house for their existence?"
Independent publishing by authors is easier with ebooks than it ever was before.
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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?
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Ah - I see that despite your limitations, you have at least mastered irony.
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But our national illiteracy rate is now at 25% and climbing.
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Really? The thoroughness of your research matches the clarity of your reasoning.
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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.
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That is just ridiculous and offensive. To liken a new (additional!) delivery medium for the written word (which only
adds to its possibilities) to the holocaust is gibbering idiocy.
/JB