Kaufman links e-book trend to bookburning, Nazis

[Patricia]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

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.

You clearly haven't visited our book upload section, then.
We have French and Russian classics of the nineteenth century.
I've been known to spend weeks making electronic versions of my favourite authors in the public domain. It might be quite difficult for people in remote locations to get their hands on a work by Huysmans or the Goncourts. Now they can do it easily and freely.
Arguably, we are making literature more accessible, not less.

But thanks for taking the time to explain your views.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

+1
Not only free, but now widely available. Ebooks have brought around far more choices and opportunities for me to read, and not just restricted me to what is currently in print or stock at the local bookshop.

So what is Alan's next whine going to be, listening to a CD takes away the cultural aspect of going to a live performance?

Listening to CD's?? You Nazi bastard!

[Kali Yuga]

At the risk of being a bit too concise:

What a load of codswallop.

It's clear that Kaufman is more interested in inflammatory rhetoric (and purple prose) than in facts or in a critical analysis guided by reason, so I see little point in any attempt to provide a rational response.

I would provide a histrionic and emotional response, but I don't think Mr Kaufman will find that particularly persuasive either.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

Godwin's Alert!

I can imagine a speech by Hitler now:

"Wollt Ihr die totale Zerstoerung aller EBuecher die die Seele des deutschen Volkes zerfressen? Wir werden sie zertreten wie Wuermer"

"Do you want the total destructions of all ebooks that eat away at the soul of the German people? We will squash them like worms"

[delphidb96]

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 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-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 emerging Corporate State.

Dear Alan,

May I call you Alan? (I don't know for sure, but it somehow seems presumptuous of me to call you "Mr. Kaufman" - I don't know you well enough. )

I own a PRS-500, Cybook Gen3, Kindle 2, Axim x51v, Gateway 5628(desktop), Mini 12 (netbook) and iPod Touch. I *also* own over 900 mass-market paperback and 200 hardcover novels as well as over 300 technical and other non-fiction works. On my primary electronic readers, the Kindle and Cybook, I have three Charles Dickens works - including "Bleak House" - one by Victor Hugo, one Hawthorne, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and, of course, Ayn Rand's, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" - all of which I find so appealing that I keep them there permanently so I can go back and re-read favorite chapters. I've read "Atlas Shrugged" over 20 times since I got a copy in ebook format.

The electronic readers, I have found, make it *MORE* likely I'll read and re-read the classics *because* I can keep them to hand no matter when or where I am. Am I stuck in the waiting room for over two hours waiting to be called to see my primary care physician and I find I've finished the contemporary novel I was reading? No problem, break out "A Tale of Two Cities". Must I hang around with distant relatives who're more interested in the outcome of the Raider's game? (Let's face facts, this year is a "can we hang them from the highest yardarm", year.) I can delve deep into John Galt's milleau, so quietly that no one notices I've withdrawn from audio-visual overload. Or I can drop into the latest edition of Beginner's Guide to Java.

As I need two canes to walk, carrying all the books I can stuff on my K2 or Gen3 would be a physical impossibility. Not only that, but if I simply *must* enter a 'public' building, it is far easier to whip out the ereader than to attempt to smuggle five or ten books through the metal-detectors. (Yes, my relatives also find this a 'good thing' for overcoming travel boredom on long flights - almost anyone can tell you horror stories of on-screen movies designed to create madness and depression.)

While it is true that those who 'live to twitter' tend to not want to bog down in lengthy descriptions or involved dialogues, the real readers out there who actually give ebook readers a chance find most often that they make the process of reading more enjoyable, not less.

As for the grasping greediness of publishers, that has always been the case - even in the epoch of dead-tree publishing. And I have no pity for most independent bookstores. They saw the trends of online marketing and electronic books coming and refused to adapt. At the very least, they could have jumped right into creating an online marketing presence. Most of them chose not to.

One of the biggest faults I found was their refusal to make their (the ones local to Sacramento, California) stores ADA compliant so I could navigate the stacks in my mobility scooter. I am an *AVID* reader, consuming even before the advent of dedicated electronic book readers, more than 20 mid-list novels per month. When I found myself forced to use a mobility scooter, I also found myself shut out of nearly all the local independent bookstores. My *money* wasn't wanted enough for them to create accessibility for me. Fine. At that point I shifted to Barnes & Noble and Amazon for their online shopping and never looked back.

What I read, Alan, from you is a whiney rant complaining that we're just not being compliant-enough useful idiots who'll put up with the rigid (dare we say nearly totalitarian) rules you'd have us follow in order to keep your fantasy of 'how it ought to be' alive. Yeah, right. That's far more in keeping with the rigidity of thought required in Fahrenheit 451 than the real situation of the public (customers/consumers) determining what the publishers (suppliers) better darned well supply!

And while *you* may not deign to read the latest Patterson, Griffin, Haig, Ringo or Weber, I note that those authors - who've advanced in learning enough to grasp Hayekian economics - *are* making a living.

Yes, there will always be those authors who so STUN the ivory-tower New York publishing elite as to guarantee that those same publishers will foist such crap onto the public despite the mediocrity of the storytelling. However, most truly successful authors have figured out that most *readers* want to read books that actually TELL a story. You might try such a novel approach in your next novel rather than expressing opinions that have no basis in reality. Well, come to think of it, is that not the base for writing poetry?

BTW, yes, I get that you've written "Matches". And it may well be a good story, but given your attitude about everything electronics, I am now one sale you'll never make. Life's a beach and then you fall off the NYT Bestseller's list.

Derek

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

At the risk of being a bit too concise:

What a load of codswallop.

Thank you for that word. I must remember to use it. Often.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

So reading is only reading if you are reading from a piece of paper?

As for a kindle being akin to Hitler exterminating Jews.........if a non-Jewish person had ever had the audacity to claim that I can only imagine the outcry!

Either you want people to read or you want people to read what you think is worth reading and in a way you think is right.

Which is it? Which is really important to you?

Cheers,
PKFFW

I think he's jewish. After all, he went to Israel, signed up for the IDF and served multiple tours over there. The novel "Matches" came from that experience, if I understand correctly.

Derek

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

I think he's jewish. After all, he went to Israel, signed up for the IDF and served multiple tours over there. The novel "Matches" came from that experience, if I understand correctly.

Derek

He is Jewish, and his father was in a concentration camp. Which is exactly why I find his comparisons so thoroughly disgusting. A slap in the face of all the sufferings of Jewish people under the Nazis.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

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

On the one hand authors have to 'beg' to exist, yet on the other they can disseminate their words with a couple of clicks?
Do you even begin to realise how self-contradictory your arguments are? I really suggest you take some time to learn a modicum of rhetorical practice before trying this again.

Your tirade appears to be little more than a confused and rambling cacophony. If you want people to take you seriously, you need to develop a considered and logical position and then have the ability to propound it with clarity. I can see no evidence of any of this here.

This essay would receive a failing grade if written by an 8th-grader.

[Elfwreck]

I'm gonna try to pretend this is serious. Really. This is my not giggling-out-loud voice; see the lack of kicking and laughing smiley. This'd be *so* easy to satirize, and I'd really rather focus on the serious claims.

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.

Erudite attention-grabbing scare tactics: Check. I'll be clipping out further examples.

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.

Those books may engage you, sir, but they are not overly relevant to my life. Out of all the history of literature, you picked... five books written by White Christian men.

Indeed, their time of dominating the intellectual world is being severely challenged by the internet. I'm not seeing this as a bad thing.

A world in which corporate-driven electronic internet promotors,

Erm. The hardcore internet promoters are not corporate-driven. Quite the opposite. Copyfight activists struggle to create nonprofit orgs that own their own servers, to be able to stand up against corporations.

with the smug certainty of the true believer, and the sort of determination incited by the smell of money,

Erm... who, exactly, is profiting from the ebooks that have been bouncing around on Usenet for the last fifteen years or so?

have launched a savage assault against the book, feverishly working to find a replacement for the physical artifact,

Not replacement. Supplement. In the way that printed books were supplements to calligraphed books, and filled a niche that the older, more artistic form could not fill. The same way that photography supplemented painted portraits. And as with hand-written books, the new form will likely surpass the old until it eventually becomes either a quaint artistic hobby, or an archivist's object.

But painting didn't vanish when photography became the common way of sharing images of people. Books will not vanish because e-texts become the standard way of storing novels. The book *industries*, OTOH, are in serious danger.

to outflank author rights

The right to make 20% of sale price, not list price, on ebooks, mandatory with the agreement to publish physically?

The ebook advocates aren't the ones making it hard for authors to make a living at their craft.

while driving in upon the print matter culture itself, book publishing, newspapers, magazines, in a concerted campaign to render them obsolete,

Don't mistake a singularity for a campaign. The current publishing industries were doomed when the first email was sent... the only issues are how long it will take, and what industries will rise in their wake.

transfer all reading material to the internet,

Copy, not transfer. Nobody's advocating getting rid of existing paper archives.

and socially condition humanity, beginning in their earliest youth, to prefer technologically driven experience over human interface.

In what way is a book "human interface?"
I've had a lot more contact with authors of ebooks than with authors of physical books I've read.

We in America are now trained not only to favor devices over the book

In case you forgot: the book is a device. It's what you use when you don't have a person in front of you to tell you a story, explain how physics works, or give you a list of phone numbers for people whose last names begin with "FRA..."

Battery-op devices are no less unnatural than ink-on-paper devices. Neither would exist without a lot of human industry.

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.

It is not, for the most part, the ebook readers who are spending 60 hours a week Warcrafting or Tweeting. In fact, ebook readers are kinda stuck *not* doing those things, because reading and websurfing don't combine well.

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

I notice you don't mention landline phones in your collection of zombie-making electronic devices. And you're not grumbling about how television has convinced people not to spend time with their friends and family. Nor how automobiles, those collections of buttons and levers and dials, have destroyed communities.

Hmm. Old tech is safe; new tech is soul-sucking?

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?

Are authors afraid those blogs will steal their readers? That if the public has *free choice* of content, they won't choose to pay for literary works, but will instead prefer gossip and lolcats?

Surprise, surprise. The public likes mindless entertainment more than the publishing industry wants to admit.

(Special side-note: the "drabble" is a form of fanfiction that's exactly 100 words long. It's been described as "fannish haiku." It takes talent to put a real story into exactly 100 words. Of course, the mainstream publishing industries don't deal with that, because even setting aside the derivative/transformative issue of fanfiction, there's no way to make a profit selling 100-word stories, unless you put a *huge* number of them in a book, and then they get overwhelmed by numbers. Mainstream publishing has no room for literary art in tiny pieces, but the internet has made it possible to be appreciated.)

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.

Somewhere on the internet, an Ubuntu programmer is laughing his head off. Because of course, when you talk about "techno-evils," you talk about the corporations that are making millions from them--not the open-source backbone of the hacker's culture from which they grew.

But this is not a Gutenberg moment: it is a Nuremberg moment

Aaaaand we have Godwin-sign!

--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.

Because making it available to everyone, for free, will surely kill it.

That term, "ghettoization," is telling. Culture, he says, is for the elite, for those with taste and refinement enough to appreciate it. Not for the impoverished and barely-English-speaking peoples. Not for those whose lifestyles don't lean towards appreciation of "classics" written and touted by White, upper-class, Christian men.

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.

Source, please?

And funny how you blame the internet for that, rather than the public school policies that pass children to the next grade regardless of academic achievement.

SNIP: "the holocaust of pbooks" paragraph. Please, sir, stop; my eyes can't handle any more rolling.

I cannot forget what the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people.

Sure. And, umm... by sharing books easily, by making them accessible to people whose eyes can't handle tiny print or whose hands shake too much to turn pages without tearing them, we are "burning" them? By transferring them from one reader to another, across the country, in seconds, we are destroying them?

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.

As someone with two children who move smoothly between reading paper and pixels--you have no idea what you're talking about.

"Demonic" technology? Is that the communication technology that makes 911 operators able to dispatch an ambulance in seconds? The microengineering technology that makes cameras to be swallowed to check for cancer symptoms? The information technology that makes weather forecasts available to anyone with access to the web?

Or is it only "demonic" when you become aware how little interest most people have in the culture you thought should be the dominant one forever? When you have to face the reality that raw, unfiltered creativity, even the trite and simplistic forms, are fascinating to millions of people? When you acknowledge that 140 characters is enough, most of the time, to say what needs to be said?

Books aren't in any danger. Books are growing like weeds. Word-based communication is exploding all over the place. It's the paper-pushing industries that are going into their death throes.

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

I think he's jewish. After all, he went to Israel, signed up for the IDF and served multiple tours over there. The novel "Matches" came from that experience, if I understand correctly.

Derek

I realise that.

My point was should a non-Jewish person have compared and ebook reader to being akin to the Holocaust I am sure there would be a huge outcry at the idiocy of the remark. Yet he makes the claim and even tries to give it credibility by stating his ancestry as being Jewish.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

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?

How ironic. You are arguing about the downfall of learned society and culture and blaming it on "demonic" technology on an Internet forum.

Well, to answer your question, it is a world of wonder and delight. That anyone with an idea or an opinion is able to "publish" with no more than a small bit on knowledge and access to a PC connected to the Internet.

Oh, and are you saying if we step back 25 years that there was no pontification and mindless drivel in print on actual, real paper?

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

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.

Hmm... you seem to be on the Internet, perhaps you should learn to make use of it. Several sources seem to show that the literacy rate in the US is 99%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._literacy_rate

Countries with 25% illiteracy have names like Belize, Kenya and Cambodia.

Don't you hate it when people just "pontificate" made up statistics on the Internet... me too!

'nuff said.

BOb

[khalleron]

You think he found us by Googling himself?

Betcha.

[Alfy]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

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.

Never thought of that, but it is SOOOOOO true.

Originally Posted by Moejoe

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.

[Sweetpea]

From what I understand from that piece is that the container is more important than the contents. A book written with electronic ink is not the same book as written with normal ink. The fact that you can find it all on the internet will make it dissapear? While most of those things are rediscovered because they were put on the internet?

And I also read somewhere that more and more people in the US are rediscovering reading because of the Kindle.

Originally Posted by Donnageddon

I am reading a lot more of the classics on my Sony than I ever did in paper form.

I've only ever bought 1 classic in paper format (The Count of Monte Cristo). And the only other classic I had read in paper format is Pride and Prejudice.