essay on hi-tech destruction of books and book culture

The enclosed essay from the current issue of Evergreen Review is about the destruction of books and book culture by such as you. What is proposing is not only ill-considered but a moral and cultural crime.
Alan Kaufman

http://evergreenreview.com/120/electronic-book-burning.html

Tyrants.

Need to do something which contradicts your previous writings? *POOF* Now it doesn’t.
You have completely changed your official line, but old books still are an evidence that you’ve been speaking something completely else just a year ago? *POOF* Now they aren’t. In fact, they serve to re-affirm that your politics have always been the same.

“Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.” — 1984

In the future, they’ll just have to make a few clicks and poof! No truth.

There’s an interesting list of sources of statistics on book sales at Google Answers:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=246739

Global Book Sales

Worth a look.

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The simple fact is we still live in a very analog world. Waste your time instead talking about how the coming digital divide – the split between those who live with technology and participate in life, and those who live for technology and don’t.

Ask yourself how many cell phones you’ve had in your life so far – how many iPods or laptops. What do we do with them when they have lived their 18-month usefulness? We throw them away and get another. We pile them in our garage, where they wilL wait until we send them to the landfill – either here or in China. But they’ll be worthless, outmoded, and a hazard.

We’ll sell an old book. Someone will read it again and pass it on to another who will do the same. And I love it when people call it “dead tree” communication. Do they ever consider tree are a renewable source? Take a minute and contemplate what’s inside your mp3 player or laptop? now stack those up and see what they’re made of?

Moreover, books *are* part of a conversation — all human thinking is part of a conversation (I recommend the work of Bakhtin – russian philosopher of language – on the “dialogical imagination”). Just as I don’t rewrite your blog post but comment on it, so there is a vast conversation surrounding Anna Karenina (or Hamlet, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).

I.e. the ‘book’ is closely connected to ‘the work’ — for example to a musical composition or a painting. It is precisely that it *can’t* be altered which gives *push* to the conversation around it.

One could go on and on about the advantages of the book — try riffling through an electronic reader text — but the main point is clear. They aren’t easily replaced.