[Moejoe]

And I too Mr. Kaufman spent a great deal of my youth and childhood in the warm confines of local libraries. I too have had friends and relatives die of drugs and other horrible things. I have been witness to suicides and stabbings, gunshots and gang fights. And in all those times it was the words, not the package that meant anything to me. It wasn't the ratty, falling-apart detective novel my grandfather gave me, but the act of giving, the words contained within that kept me reading well after my bedtime as a child. It wasn't the paper and the hard binding of Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat" that made me look at my own impoverishment differently, but the words, the words. Always the words.

You want to defend the physical book, go ahead, but you're defending the dead. It's as dead as parchment and quills. It's as dead as the typewriter and the ribbon. As dead as the notions of Fascism and book burning.

No book will ever be burned again. No story will ever go untold. No poet will ever be unpublished. Every man, woman and child will be a library unto themselves.