Open to Government Control

Might that Amazon Kindle in your hand be a threat to your freedom? said Husna Haq in CSMonitor.com. That’s what Jonathan Franzen, the acclaimed author of The Corrections and Freedom, suggested at a book festival last week. Sounding a “battle cry against e-readers,” the best-selling novelist railed against digital books, saying they’re “not for serious readers” and that their impermanence might even open the door to Orwellian censorship. If books are on e-readers and not on paper, he said, their texts can be changed or deleted by some central authority—a situation “not compatible with responsible self-government.” It may sound paranoid, said E.D. Kain in Forbes​.com, but Franzen has a point. To ban or burn books, authoritarian governments have to hunt down every copy. But a digital text originating from some external source “simply has to be turned off.” Without ink on paper, it’s that much easier to make “Ray Bradbury’s nightmare” a reality. Read more at The Week