This is just so incredible I can’t do it justice. It’s a combination of ludditeism, religious zeal and misinformation. Go to the Red Room and read author Alan Kaufman’s tirade against ebooks and technology in general. I can’t even figure out what to quote. Each paragraph is more incredible than the next. Amazing!

Thanks to Danny Bloom for the link.

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15 COMMENTS

  1. I plugged the same article into a MobileRead forum for discussion. The comments are already fairly lively.

    I can only guess Kaufman is afraid of his written legacy somehow disappearing into the ether if it is no longer ink in a volume of paper. A sad conclusion to be sure. Even sadder is his outright condemnation of all things electronic, clearly the icon he holds up as the demon Progress.

  3. It seems like, with a quick search at Amazon, that his books are mostly out of print anyway.

    The very fact that he has a blog for writing seems to undercut his gripes. He isn’t even a consistent anti-technologist. Now James Ellroy, the crime writer, at least does it right: he doesn’t own a cell phone or computer, he doesn’t watch TV or go the movies, and writes all his books long hand because he cant type. But I can buy some of James Ellroy’s novels as ebooks, so I’m guessing he isn’t pitching a hissy about how bad ebooks are, unlike Kaufman.

    The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book.

    Nitpick: shouldn’t that be das Buch? And his other analogies are about as good as his German.

  5. It is ironic that Kaufman should write so much about his fetish for paper books in an electronic article :).

    Lets be honest, independent book sellers have been in trouble for a long time in this country. Even now, ebooks make up a small enough portion of the book market (as opposed to say for music or news where electronic media really is significant) that I doubt it is responsible for more than a handful of recent book store closings … and then only as the straw that broke the camel’s back. Why are independent bookstores in trouble? Maybe Amazon? Maybe the economy? Maybe the many other forms of media that the internet has enabled?

    I also find it ironic that Kaufman, quotes Farenheit 451 in defense of paper books. In the novel, as the book lovers near the end of the book demonstrate, it is not the medium that is important, but what the medium contains. The book lovers memorize the book and then destroy it. They preserve the book in their minds to ensure its survival. The paper matters far less than what is written on them.

    Ultimately, Kaufman has come to view the medium (The paper book) as the end all and be all of what books are about. He would be laughed at if he expressed similar opinions about bound books versus scrolls… indeed, perhaps he should be laughed at here as well.

  6. think about the out-of-print books from the 50’s. the ones that weren’t quiiiite popular enough to stay in print, or to be re-printed, but may still be useful — or at least ‘fun’.

    with no electronic backup files, those books will be cornflakes in another 25 years — if they aren’t already — and likely gone forever.

  10. And please note: although Teleread credited me above for the link, in fact, I first read the news about this appalling oped piece in NEWSWEEK, in a blog note by Weston Kosova there, staff reporter at Newsweek, who blogged on this Kaufman “scream”, also noting the irony, and also noting that Alan probably lacks a sense of irony on all this at the moment. I think he just got carried away, and remember, Kaufman is the son of Holocaust survivors who grew up in a rather dysfunctional family and while this does not excuse his crazy rant about ebooks, it does help explain his personality. Forgive him, he did not know what he was doing. He meant well, but it came across very very pathetic and poorly worded. But all credit must go to Weston Kosova at Newsweek for being the first to unearth this appalling rant. I just picked it up from Newsweek and left some good comments there too.

  11. “And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human.”

    Apparently there were not very many humans on planet earth before the creation of the printing press. And also by that logic I assume Jesus was a monkey?

    Besides, I thought it was the MP3 player causing the death of orchestras that was going to be the DEATH OF HUMANITY!

    Or wait, didn’t we stop being human with the invention of the automobile?

  13. And yet, I love this sentence about alternative career options: “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.”

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