[catsittingstill]

Dear Mr Kauffman,

Thanks to Delphidb96, I noticed this post you had written. Apparently, however, you deleted it after it was quoted--at least, when I try to jump back to the original post, it's gone, replaced with some short sentence about paranoia being having all the facts. Perhaps you thought better of it, and wished to retract it, perhaps you thought a short quote would be more poignant as a "good-bye" (we can only hope for the best) post, but for whatever reason, you tried to destroy this post, to "burn" it if you will.

But you couldn't.

Why is that, Mr Kauffman? It is because you released the post on the Internet, an aggregate of millions of people reading, thinking, and writing responses--a place where almost nothing is ever lost.

You, the author, couldn't "burn" this work. How do you imagine a government, or a corporation, will *ever* manage it?

And this is why we tell you e-books, though they seem to you ephemeral as light, embodied in delicate patterns of electric charge as fragile as a mayfly's wing, destroyed by the passing of a magnet in a nearby pocket, are in fact nearly unkillable.

Just as your post survived your attempt at destruction because someone else picked it up and quoted it, so the books you fear for will be passed on from hard drive to hard drive, from post to post. They will be safer for being available as pure data.

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
Dear Derek and others here on Mobile Read,
I'm afraid this must be my goodbye as I'm actually been neglecting the responses to my piece in Huff Post in order to spend time answering your replies. I must dialogue with them now.

I must say that this has been a very interesting experience for me and to a great degree, a failiure.(sic)

I would have to agree. Coming charging in calling us Nazis set you up for failure, and then not having any evidence for your bizarre assertions pretty much tied it up with a bow. I *am* saddened, though, that we were completely unable to bring you to contemplate the possibility that you might be mistaken about e-books--or even about the advisability of beginning a discussion by calling your audience Nazis.

I've gained a broad impression that many of you feel strongly that hi-tech plays, in some fashion, a key role in your life.

If you mean the part about not spending my life grubbing for roots in the dirt and being abused by people with bigger muscles and having ten babies that die before age five, yeah, that plays a key role in my life. Thank goodness.

Such a place was the Library in the Bronx where I grew up, a place where people were shot (my friends Spider and Chief) or stabbed (my couson Harvey)

It would truly have been terrible to have your friends shot in the library, but maybe that's not what actually happened?

At home, where I was beaten, and screamed at and mocked around the clock,

Um. How awful. Home is a place where you should be safe. Your mother should be someone who comforts and helps you.

You do understand, however, that the way you were treated at home as a kid has nothing to do with technology, right?

John Locke wrote: "New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."

Yeah, that's precisely what you are doing to us. Oh, wait, you meant something else?

Thanks Delphidb96, for quoting this post, so I could see it.