[Elfwreck]

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.

1) "Replace" is not the same as "destroy." Nobody's advocating the removal of books--they're advocating an *additional* method of information exchange, one that's not subject to burning, one that's widespread and cheap and long-lasting.

2) Many of us believe that what's important about books is the content, not the carrier. That while a leatherbound silk-paper book is a glorious device, and aesthetically pleasing, a dog-eared paperback is much less so, and replacing it with a collection of ones and zeros is no great loss to the world.

What do you think should be done about the incredible amount of waste created by the publishing industries? All those popular novels that are read once and thrown into garbage bins... should it be mandatory to recirculate them somehow?

3) We are predicting, not advocating, drastic changes and the probable destruction of the printing industries. This is the same destruction-of-industry that happened when the automobile made horse-drawn carriages obsolete. They still exist, but they're no longer a common method of transportation; we expect--without insisting--that paper books will eventually reach the same state. (Note that the existence of recorded music has not destroyed live music industries. We expect the same for books: the addition of a high-tech version of the content will not eliminate demand for the low-tech version, just change it.)

4) Books are not people. Repeat: BOOKS ARE NOT PEOPLE. Destruction of books (which is not being advocated) is not the same as murder. This hyperbole is why a lot of people have stopped listening to you. Human culture may change as a result of ebooks, but this will not cause the slaughter of millions. If you believe otherwise, you'll need to support that claim.

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,

One of the principal pillars of WHITE EUROPEAN society. Books have not been a tool of enlightenment and wisdom in all the world's cultures; in a lot of them, books are a tool of oppression and domination. Your unwillingness to acknowledge how online communication has brought a voice to many formerly-silenced people is another reason people aren't taking you seriously.

And we are not "destroying" books. EBOOKS ARE BOOKS. We are destroying, perhaps, the social egregores on which the publishing industries rely. Books--the collections of copyrightable material--exist outside of the media that carry them.

and you are replacing what you destroy with a kind of nihilistic apathetic cult of convenience.

Since starting to read ebooks, I've learned to use PML, Dropbook, Calibre, aspects of Styles in Word, ConvertLit, RB Library, eCub, and am pondering tackling installation of Python and use of scripts. There's an awful lot of computer skills tied up in my "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.

You have some odd delusions about the ebook world. I have a Sony PRS-505. Nobody tracks what I read. Not even my computer; most of my books are loaded drag-and-drop onto the Reader, from three different computers; there's no record of what I've read and what I haven't, and what I've edited on the Reader.

You've mistaken the Kindle for "all ebook readers" (and you've got some mistaken ideas about that), and that's part of why MR members don't take you seriously--you don't know what you're talking about.

Why is it so hard to grasp that wharever benefit you believe accrues for you from these machines

Like carrying 400 books in my purse, and loading a handful of 20k-50k-word fanfics onto the reader in the morning so I've got new reading material during lunch, and the ability to keep my place in a dozen reference books at once. The ability to keep obscure, funny scripts with me at all times, to show off to new friends if they're interested. (I have the Happy Fun Ball text on my Reader.) The ability to keep maps and bus schedules indefinitely, not have them get wrinkled and torn in my purse.

is rubbish compared to the cultural traditions and human freedoms that you are blithely trampling on.

You'll need to describe a bit better these "cultural traditions and human freedoms," because I'm not seeing how those are being lost. The tradition that says publishers will decide what's fit for me to read? The freedom to pay not only for what I read, but for the percentage of books that get returned as unsellable?

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.

I'm so sorry you're so scared at all these changes.

If the Goddess exists in the blackness between the stars, then surely She exists in the blank pixels between screen changes. Gadgets don't destroy my soul.

And these gadgets aren't isolated, didn't spring out of nowhere... they came on the coattails of generations of computer, television, and music distribution technology. Which part of an ebook reader is soul-destroying? The part that gets content from the internet? The part that lets people with poor eyesight read books previously unavailable to them? The part that lets them carry hundreds of hours of entertainment in their pockets?

They have wounded your moral perception, your abiility to weigh and measure consequences.

This is a decent claim (not, I believe, an accurate one), but you haven't supported it. You will have to define moral perception, and describe how those who use ebooks lack it. In order to do that, you'll need a lot more awareness of how ebooks work and who uses them.

[quote]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 [quote]

We don't conflate those two. The publishing industry is not the same as book culture. If you want to claim they are, you'll need another essay.

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.

What makes books "sacred?" The shape, or the contents? What obligation have we to maintain them as objects--do you rail against the recycling industries that turn used books and newspapers and magazines into pulp?

Do you think there's a difference between books, newspapers and magazines, other than "some are published on cheaper paper, and more often?"