Kaufman links e-book trend to bookburning, Nazis

[luqmaninbmore]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

I've read "Atlas Shrugged" over 20 times since I got a copy in ebook format.

You are strong like bull.

[emonti8384]

"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."

Umm...what?
Try reading this list of the "Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States" and see which myth is number one

http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=6&n=1

[JayCeeEll]

Mr. Kauffman,

I would like to address one point you made in your article.

Had I been told from youth that my literary destination would be some 7 inch plastic gizmo containing my texts shuffling alongside thousands of other “texts” I would have spit in the face of such a profession and become instead a hit man or a rabbi.

At what point in your life did the medium become more important than the message?

Do you believe that any recent communication by Professor Stephen Hawing is invalid because it is all electronic. Should he perhaps be given pen and paper and left to get on with it?

Are we now to start worshiping the hot air coming out of someones mouth rather than consider the ideas they intend to generate.

I think that perhaps you had better buy a gun and start practising.

[pshrynk]

It's nice to see that Mobile Read has drawn some attention from outside our boundaries...

[desertgrandma]

Wait.

Could we be going about this the wrong way?

Attacking his beliefs will only embed them.

A group of us, with our readers, showing him WHY they are so important.........now thats something else.

Serious conversations and one on one demo's would have to change his mind!

Having him see is isn't "one or the other" that most of us love both our paper books and e-books.....that there is no difference in the reading experience once you get into a great story......thats what could have an effect.

As for the rising illiteracy rate.....its starts at birth, people. You gotta read to your kids every frickin' day. They have to see you with a book, paper or ebook in your face.

oops......off my soapbox now.

[Slite]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Wait.

Could we be going about this the wrong way?

Attacking his beliefs will only embed them.

A group of us, with our readers, showing him WHY they are so important.........now thats something else.

Serious conversations and one on one demo's would have to change his mind!

Having him see is isn't "one or the other" that most of us love both our paper books and e-books.....that there is no difference in the reading experience once you get into a great story......thats what could have an effect.

As for the rising illiteracy rate.....its starts at birth, people. You gotta read to your kids every frickin' day. They have to see you with a book, paper or ebook in your face.

oops......off my soapbox now.

And if that doesn't work. We can always use the readers to beat som sense into him?

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Slite

And if that doesn't work. We can always use the readers to beat som sense into him?

Not with MY reader you don't!!!!

It wouldn't be necessary.

I cannot fathom of someone ignorant enough to deny the usefulness once its been shown.

[Hellmark]

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
..Nuremberg moment...
..an economic Krystallnacht ...
..witness to the ghettoization and deportation...
..no visible brown shirts posted outside...
..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.

...the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people.
..invisible greed-driven Corporate Gauleiters and Furers.
..the coming collective burnings on behalf of the emerging Corporate State.

Can you write something WITHOUT nazi references? The one sentence alone you make 6 references alone.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

For all his prosaic pronunciations, Kaufman is so far from "getting it," you'd think he was on another plane of existence altogether. He's actually worried about books being burned.

He needs to be worried about books being forgotten. Or a society that can't spread them around.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Can you write something WITHOUT nazi references? The one sentence alone you make 6 references alone.

He's not heard of Godwin. In fact, he might be the last person on the planet who hasn't heard of Godwin.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

A group of us, with our readers, showing him WHY they are so important.........now thats something else.

I doubt that would work. Some people really have that irrational and highly emotional reaction to e-books. Personally I'm puzzled but that's all. Everybody is entitled to their tastes. I don't like donuts, but I am not comparing people who eat them to Hitler

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

For all his prosaic pronunciations, Kaufman is so far from "getting it," you'd think he was on another plane of existence altogether. He's actually worried about books being burned.

He needs to be worried about books being forgotten. Or a society that can't spread them around.

That sounds more realistic, but it's exagerated IMO. Books used to be the only means of spreading stories and knowledge. Now they have competition. I don't like it much, but I doubt it's going to bring about the end of the world. Unless you consider that the world, as we know it, dies every day.

Oh no, what did I just write? Am I going into Jedi master mode?

Anyway, I'm sure there must be a gazillion threads about the disappearance of books, and its connection to the end of the world. I just don't buy it. Nobody used to think that peasants or shoemakers should read books, quite the contrary. Now they can, and some of them certainly do. Many don't bother, but I don't think there are more now than there used to be. I think we live in a very enlightened era, if you care to compare the state of the whole population now and then, instead of the whole population now with a small elite of the past.

I'm sure I could say more on that subject, but I'm getting tired and distracted. I just hope that what I wrote makes some sense

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

He's not heard of Godwin. In fact, he might be the last person on the planet who hasn't heard of Godwin.

Make that next to last. Who's Godwin?

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Make that next to last. Who's Godwin?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=godwin%27s+law

BOb

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Make that next to last. Who's Godwin?

Godwin's Law

[pshrynk]

Godwin's Law of the Internet basically says that when Nazi Germany is brought up in a thread, then the thread has stopped having any relevance and should be abandoned.