I first read about Mr Kaufman's very
inelegant diatribe against ebooks, with all the strange Holocaust/Nazi imagery, via a Newsweek magazine blog in October and passed the link on to Steve Jordan at MobileRead here where he threaded it in....and I was so appalled in mid October at Mr Kaufman's bizarre Nazi/Holocaust imagery that I took the liberty....just as a thought experiment...... to gently REWRITE and EDIT his commentary to make it more
palatable and therefore perhaps to allow readers to get through it and acutally read it better and maybe see the points he was trying to make. Some of his points are worth considering.
I sent th revised text to Alan and he got angry. Very angry. I told him that I fully and deeply respected his life and ideas as the son of Holocaust survivors, but that his use of such imagery in an article about paper books versus e-books was completely bonkers and beyond the pale and was turning readers off to his argument.
I told him that all I did was to take out all the Nazi / Holocaust imagery from his commentary and let the argument stand or fall on the basis of his views on paper culture verus screen culture. But he did not like my modus operandi. He told me in no uncertain terms:
Quote:
"Sir, by rewriting and editing my original text, you exemplify the sort of hi-tech totalitarian that I write about. By what right do you pass my essay through your own private censorship bureau and then present it for all the world to see with the "distasteful" parts edited out?
" With the shallow piety typical of your kind, you think it justifiable to exercize censorship in defense of what you deem inappropriate: i.e.--my referencing of the Holocaust. But it was precisely this sort of justification that Nazis offered for their own brands of censorship. And once you have taken upon yuurself the right to unitaliterally violate my text, and present it as you wish, you have crossed a line to that region where it then becomes, by your lights, as you deem fit, since you are the standard bearer of your own self-invented morality -- a morality that you more or less maker up as you go along -- to next violate another aspect of human rights beyond freedom of expresion. "
".....in performing this desecration of my text, this escoriation of its central thesis, you have proven yourself to be already in the avant garde of the hi-tech barbarians all marching in lock-step into the electronic Orwellian future. "
"I demand, in the name of Freedom of Expression, that you remove, immediately, this raped version of my text ...."
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