[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

But I don't understand how you can have read what you've read in my Huffington Post piece about the history of Nazi Genicide and destruction of the PHYSICAL book, and still not understand why your ownership and advocacy of a machine created to displace the book as a cultural artifact is a kind of cultural crime and prefigures a totalitarian condition that could lead to genocide. Why is it so impossible for you to grasp that what you are engaging in, doing, is destroying the world of books, one of the principal pillars upon which decent society has rested, and you are replacing what you destroy with a kind of nihilistic apathetic cult of convenience. Further, you are willing to trade away your privacy and individual freedom by subsidizing an electronic fake book linked to networks that keep track of what you read. Why is it so hard to grasp that wharever benefit you believe accrues for you from these machines is rubbish compared to the cultural traditions and human freedoms that you are blithely trampling on. I don't understand how you don't see that and must conclude that there is something fundamentally changed in you as the result of your immersion in the culture of these soul-destroying gadgets. They have wounded your moral perception, your abiility to weigh and measure consequences. You and your fellow e-bookers and high-techers are guilty. I accuse you all of gross cultural irresponsability that has lead to the imminent downfall of the book iindustry and the desruction of book culture and I regard it as little less than an economic and cultural war crime of sorts, no less than any Nazi who burned a book. For like him, you are thoughtless, ignorant of history and its consequences and clueless as to the horrors that you are inviting into our lives by destroying the sacred book.

Nazi Germany destroyed lives and almost an entire culture. Not buying books printed on paper kills no one. It does not destroy cultural artifacts, it just does not purchace them.

I think that the problem of communication that exists here is in the definition of "book." Your position, I think, is that a "book" is something printed on paper that has a physical presence that can be measured in three dimensional space.

My definition of "book" is something that consists of a narrative in words that can be read (not viewed) that takes up a certain length of my time to read. Shorter narratives of the same qualification are "stories."

I do not agree with you that the use of electronic media to read equates with genocide or cultural destruction. It is the next phase of evolution of reading and conveyance of thought and information. These are, of course my opinion and I do not require that you change your mind to fit my opinion in order to consider you to be a fellow human worthy of consideration.

That would be Nazi-like behavior, if you ask me.