I'm a Kindle-loving Nazi?

Saturday, 11:29 pm

By Kate

Dec

05

2009

I do so love my Kindle. This afternoon I wirelessly downloaded 13 books for a total cost of $24.40. As follows:

1. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - $0.0

2. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott - $0.0

3. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - $0.0

4. The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald - $0.0

5. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald - $0.0

6. Sookie Stackhouse 8-book “boxed set" - Charlaine Harris - $24.40 (includes: Dead Until Dark, Living Dead in Dallas, Club Dead, Dead to the World, Dead as a Doornail, Definitely Dead, All Together Dead, From Dead to Worse)

I also get a subscription to The New Yorker and daily New York Times latest news articles (in depth and updated several times a day) for a total of $4.98 per Month.

And I get to carry all that reading material (plus about 300 other titles) around in a light-weight device the width and height of an average paperback novel. I really can’t imagine what’s not to like about that, but I know that some people are opposed to digital/e-books for various reasons. Perhaps the monks thought Gutenberg’s invention heralded the end of civilization, too. Change is hard for some folks.

And some folks seem to think that reading is an all or nothing proposition—either you read all paper books or you read all e-books and destroy the world. Never seems to penetrate their noggins that some of us buy dead tree books, borrow dead tree books from the library, and buy and read e-books as well. I’ve even heard it said that some people even—gasp!—listen to audio books. And you know what? It is entirely plausible that we can do all of the above without bringing civilization down around our ears.

Bearing that in mind, this HuffPo article is over the top, stupid, and really offensive. I mean, reaaaaaaally grossly offensive. The author equates the Kindle (and Google books) to Nazi book burnings and concentration camp culture. Slightly ironic that the article’s author has a book offered for $9.99 on Kindle. How much you want to wager he’s donating those evil Nazi royalty dollars to the charity of his choice? Yeah, me neither.