[HansTWN]

The book and book culture are not in danger. And no, there is nothing "wrong" with paper books. There wasn't anything wrong with handwritten books when the printing press came along. We are just at such a stage of transformation. This transformation makes distribution and storage more efficient, and books even more accessible.

You say convenience is evil. Where I live few English books are available, why is the same book in physical form, that I have to order at a much greater cost and that I have to wait weeks for, more "worthy" than an electronic version that I purchase on a website and get immediately? Many people live a long way from bookstores, should they drive for hours just to get the same thing? Yes, some books are not well suited for ebook versions. That is when typesetting or diagrams, pictures, maps, etc are important. Or when they are not meant to be read linearly. But when the text, the message is the essence, then it really doesn't matter.

If you read your original post and review the words you yourself have used you can hardly blame others for reacting in kind or ridiculing you. Your family went through unspeakable sufferings, we all feel for you. But this makes it even more difficult for us to understand how you can equate a simple "form shifting" with the destruction of culture and compare us to those butchers of humanity? A form shifting which actually makes censorship even more difficult, which enables the message to be spread around the world in no time, evading those that want to destroy the freedom to read.

Imagine if ebooks had been available during the 3rd Reich. Now matter how many books the Nazis would have burned, people could have instantaneously replaced them with new ones. And it would have been virtually impossible to track and control people's minds. What if there had been an internet? Cell phones with cameras? Overnight the whole world would have known what terrible atrocities the Nazis committed and they would have been stopped much earlier. What better way to stop tyranny then such technology? You really can't see how terribly wrong and unjust your comparison is?

TV has been working at destroying reading and book culture, but electronic books are actually helping books make a comeback. Tech is not a general evil, it is just the question of how it is used and abused -- just like everything else.