Kaufman links e-book trend to bookburning, Nazis

[DawnFalcon]

It's been one of those days.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

If you think about it, libraries aren't just depositories for book, they are redundant depositories for books. That means that if a disaster befalls Mankind, many books are likely to survive, somewhere.

Apply that sensible thinking to digital files, and sooner or later we can expect to see multiple hardened depositories for digital files. The good news is, such depositories don't need to be a huge building, they only need to be a protected server and dedicated power in a small room, much easier to locate, and easier to make so many more of them. After some planning and effort, it would be easy enough to place hundreds of those all over the world, one or three in orbit, stick one on the Moon, and send the last one off to Betelgeuse just for grins...

True, if we go to nuclear WWIII before we get around to doing that, we'll lose our digital books... along with our printed books. But it really won't be that important at that point, will it?

To get us back on topic, it should be noted that the Nazis would have loved WWIII, as it would have solved the whole book-burning thing in one fell swoop...

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

If you think about it, libraries aren't just depositories for book, they are redundant depositories for books. That means that if a disaster befalls Mankind, many books are likely to survive, somewhere.

Sort of like Memory Alpha on Star Trek. One of several redundant data centers for the federation's knowledge.

BOb

[grimo1re]

*wiping tears from eyes* Thanks guys. I had a good laugh at the article and then at this thread. Needed a good laugh

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Apply that sensible thinking to digital files, and sooner or later we can expect to see multiple hardened depositories for digital files. The good news is, such depositories don't need to be a huge building, they only need to be a protected server and dedicated power in a small room

Server? Memory diamond.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Server? Memory diamond.

See? These things aren't that hard to work out. It's just a matter of doing it.

[emonti8384]

"Like dead souls leaving their earthly bodies the books are, in effect, going to a better place: the Kindle, the e-book, the web; hi-tech's version of Paradise"

Hmmm... I guess I never thought of my Sony as "Heaven" before.....so if ereaders are Heaven why is this guy bitching? Or is Heaven a bad place now?

"To them, my sentiments and opinions may seem exaggerated, even silly, perhaps crazy. Maybe they are right. Perhaps I am crazy."

You think, you crazy old buffoon?! Whatever gave you that idea?

I hate how it becomes a which-one-is-better-pbook-or-ebook debate. I love my reader, I still love to read pbooks. I don't understand why the two can't exist simultaneously.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by emonti8384

You think, you crazy old buffoon?! Whatever gave you that idea?

I hate how it becomes a which-one-is-better-pbook-or-ebook debate. I love my reader, I still love to read pbooks. I don't understand why the two can't exist simultaneously.

They can, and they do.

We just hear the crackpots because they need to feel validated.

[Alan Kaufman]

A Statement From Alan Kaufman, author of 'THE ELECTRONIC BOOKBURNING' To My Mobile Read Critics
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html

STATEMENT

We are slowly dissolving in a catastrophe of blandness. A stainless steel tableau of screen-mummified generic looking clone people placidly seated in the sun on perfect lawns of Astroturf, gaping at laptops and ipods and Blackberries. A fear-constricted world painted in the fading pastels of distraction- benumbed senses. A world in which fewer and fewer people bother to read books that engage you. I don't mean Harry Potter or James Patterson. I mean The Brothers Karamazov. I mean Madame Bovary, Sound and Fury, War and Peace, Bleak House. . A world in which corporate-driven electronic internet promotors, with the smug certainty of the true believer, and the sort of determination incited by the smell of money, have launched a savage assault against the book, feverishly working to find a replacement for the physical artifact, performing massive legalistic maneuvers on a war-sized scale to outflank author rights while driving in upon the print matter culture itself, book publishing, newspapers, magazines, in a concerted campaign to render them obsolete, transfer all reading material to the internet, and socially condition humanity, beginning in their earliest youth, to prefer technologically driven experience over human interface.

We in America are now trained not only to favor devices over the book but to prefer them to reality itself, so that en masse we now spend the majority of our lives seated before screens, staring and surfing, typing and gaming, twittering and viewing, punching keys, pressing buttons. We who are manipulating the mouse that confers upon us the illusion of supreme control are ourselves the
mice.

Naked reality without these buttons to press seems virtually unimaginable, even unlivable to most people today. In point of fact, a decision not to engage with electronic technology guarantees ones exile to a Devil's island of chilling isolation . Ia a world where everyone communicates through Facebook, twitter, blackberries, laptops, MySpace, to decide not to engage is to move in a deaf and dumb zone of uncommunicative zombies mesmerized by the visual stunts of the latest app and disinclined whatsoever to even note your existence.

What is this world we are making, in whch writers, now are told by the culture that they must beg at the internet portal for their existence? What is this world in which anyone with an arsenal of one hundred words may declare oneself an author by signing on for a blog, sprucing it up with graphics and pontificating about what they had for breakfast and what they think of Britney Spears? You have been cookie-cut by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Kindle ---and you don't even know it-- to dwell in a technological eternal sunshine of the
inflated ego.

Many have called this a Gutenberg moment, a global paradigm shift akin to that which occurred with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent transfer of knowledge to the average man.

But this is not a Gutenberg moment: it is a Nuremberg moment--a linguistic and cultural mass murder of the human mind; an economic Krystallnacht against the book, book culture, literacy and human freedom. We are witness to the ghettoization and deportation of our language and literature to the internet,where it will surely perish. No, there are no visible brown shirts posted outside the bookstores that have shut down all across the U.S. But our national illiteracy rate is now at 25% and climbing. The corporations are producing a generatiton of machine-addicted barbarians. The efforts of techno-fascists to make the Book into the reviled Jew of our culture is no less insidious then the campaign waged in WWII by Nazi Germany against my people, the Jewish People, the People of the Book, and I say this as a child of a Holocaust survivor, sensitive to the horrors that such allusions summon and not lightly given to make such comparisons.

I cannot forget what the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people. When I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 I see a population losing its humanness, individuality and character; becoming socially-conditioned drones of distant hidden invisible greed-driven Corporate Gauleiters and Furers. And as we watch the Orwellian electronic book burning underway across this nation, the plummeting of the American mind into ignorance and addiction, we may well wonder what form of efficient demonic technology will next be used, not to indoctrinate but to incinerate our illiterate bodies and those of our children and their children in the coming collective burnings on behalf of the emerging Corporate State.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Statement From Alan Kaufman, author of 'THE ELECTRONIC BOOKBURNING' To MY Mobile Read Critics (http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html)

STATEMENT

We are slowly dissolving in a catastrophe of blandness. A stainless steel tableau of screen-mummified generic looking clone people placidly seated in the sun on perfect lawns of Astroturf, gaping at laptops and ipods and Blackberries. A fear-constricted world painted in the fading pastels of distraction- benumbed senses. A world in which fewer and fewer people bother to read books that engage you. I don't mean Harry Potter or James Patterson. I mean The Brothers Karamazov. I mean Madame Bovary, Sound and Fury, War and Peace, Bleak House. . A world in which corporate-driven electronic internet promotors, with the smug certainty of the true believer, and the sort of determination incited by the smell of money, have launched a savage assault against the book, feverishly working to find a replacement for the physical artifact, performing massive legalistic maneuvers on a war-sized scale to outflank author rights while driving in upon the print matter culture itself, book publishing, newspapers, magazines, in a concerted campaign to render them obsolete, transfer all reading material to the internet, and socially condition humanity, beginning in their earliest youth, to prefer technologically driven experience over human interface.

We in America are now trained not only to favor devices over the book but to prefer them to reality itself, so that en masse we now spends the majority of our lives seated before screens, staring and surfing, typing and gaming, twittering and viewing, punching keys, pressing buttons. We who are manipulating the mouse that confers upon us the illusion of supreme control are ourselves the
mice.

Naked reality without these buttons to press seems virtually unimaginable, even unlivable to most people today. In point of fact, a decision not to engage with electronic technology guarantees ones exile to a Devil's island of chilling isolation . Ia a world where everyone communicates through Facebook, twitter, blackberries, laptops, MySpace, to decide not to engage is to move in a deaf and dumb zone of uncommunicative zombies mesmerized by the visual stunts of the latest app and disinclined whatsoever to even note your existence.

What is this world we are making, in whch writers, now are told by the culture that they must beg at the internet portal for their existence? What is this world in which anyone with an arsenal of one hundred words may declare oneself an author by signing on for a blog, sprucing it up with graphics and pontificating about what they had for breakfast and what they think of Alan Kaufman? These poseurs, have their audiences. yes. Their audience are the other illiterates like themselves who have been cookie-cut by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Kindle.

Many have called this a Gutenberg moment, a global paradimgne shift akin to that which occurred with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent transfer of knowledge to the average man.

This is not a Gutenberg moment: it is a Nuremberg moment--a linguistic and cultural mass murder of the human mind; an economic Krystallnacht against the book, book culture, literacy, human freedom. We are witness to the ghettoization and deportation of our language and literature to the internet,where it will surely perish. No, there are no visible brown shirts posted outside the bookstores that have shut down all across the U.S. But our national illiteracy rate is now at 25% and climbing. The corporations are producing a generatiton of machine-addicted barbarians. The efforts of techno-fascists to make the Book into the reviled Jew of our culture is no less insidious then the campaign waged in WWII by Nazi Germany against my people, the Jewish People, the People of the Book, and I say this as a child of a Holocaust survivor, sensitive to the horrors that such allusions summon and not lightly given to make such comparisons.

I cannot forget what the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people. When I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 I see a population losing its humanness, individuality and character; becoming socially-condition drones of distant hidden invisible greed-driven Corporate Gauleiters and Furers. And as we watch the Orwellian electronic book burning underway across this nation, the plummeting of the American mind into ignorance and addiction, we may well wonder what form of efficient demonic technology will next be used, not to indoctrinate but to incinerate our illiterate bodies and those of our children and their children in the coming collective burnings on behalf of the future Corporate State.

Oh dear, you really don't get it do you? You don't understand one thing about the democratization the internet provides. How it frees writers from corporations and bottom-lines. How it give voices to those who would otherwise be voiceless. How, in the grand scheme of things, no book can ever be burned again, for it will live forever as long as one person is bothered to make a digital copy.

You're a fetishist, sir, of the highest order. A book sniffer, a glue-huffer, a fingertip romantic more in love with the idea of books than you ever were with the knowledge or the words contained within.

You are a dinosaur. We are the comets. You may turn your head away from the skies and imagine we are not here, but we are, and soon you and your ideas will be nothing more than a wikipedia stub, begging to be expanded.

Yours
The internets.

[Phogg]

So...

The detox unit didn't work out then?

Voices still telling you to do things?
Words on paper suddenly mean different things when displayed on a screen the exact same way?

Sad really.

[kindlekitten]

gee, do the words; "we're reading now more than ever" mean anything? at all?

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

gee, do the words; "we're reading now more than ever" mean anything? at all?

Apparently only if they're on paper, bound with some other paper and held together with decomposing glue.

[PhishStyx]

Here is what I think you, sir, should do. You may wish to read to the end prior to acting my instructions out.

1) Stand up.
2) Reach around behind your computer.
3) Pull the plug out from the wall.
4) Pick up your computer and defenestrate it.
5) Once you've done that pick up your wooden stylus and clay tablet.
6) Continue writing.

[induna]

Alan,

Although I sympathize with many of the sentiments you have expressed vis-a-vis the current cultural/intellectual/ethical climate of the developed world, I think you are mistaken in picking the electronic book as a necessary symptom of this banal cultural retrenchment. I do not doubt for a moment that there are those who see electronic books as a means to gain further control -- read ways to make more money -- over the types of written content people read and the ideas, emotions, and experiences they contain. However, this is nothing new. One of the primary features of any society are the types of intellectual content it attempts to promulgate or suppress.

In the end, for me, my electronic reader is simply a better way to read books. After all, isn't it the content that matters most? Isn't that what Fahrenheit 451 concludes? The physical books may be destroyed, but the words, and what they come to represent to the reader/listener, go on. The electronic book is just another way of telling the story, one that has tremendous capacity, flexibility, and portability. Will it be abused for cynical gain and pandering to the base? Undoubtedly. It will also be the means by which many people come to cherish the written word.