Quote:
Originally Posted by taglines
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:
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Tagline,
To be honest, I"d be upset if someone chose to edit and redact one of my screeds to make it more 'palatable'. So on that point alone, I can fully agree with Alan. (Wow! I'm agreeing with Alan Kaufman!?!)
But with the rest, I have no problem because I think that removing the Nazi/Holocaust element *does* reduce the argument to a more, hmmm... precise discussion between the inherent value of paper vs. ebooks.
I rather wish Alan had chosen this approach rather than hypering off into a rant on totalitarianism whereby he labelled us all proto-Nazis.
Derek