Electronic Publishing, Big Brother, and Revisionism

[Phil Elmore]

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=103414

"...Remove that physical element, render the entire publishing industry digital, and what have you got? The citizen is left with text files in the ether, books that, when summoned to and downloaded for his or her iPod, Kindle, Zune, or whatever, could be subject to change at the source, at the location from which the files are served and authorized. What is to stop an increasingly controlling government – or a publishing authority attempting to curry favor with that government – from doing so? Nothing, if the "books" we read are only zeroes and ones..."

[natcherly]

Good ol' Geoge O. could not have imagined how this development would have impacted the work of the Ministry of Truth. Global find/replace and a few rewrites to replace the laborious and time consuming paperbased process dedicated to the propostion:

He who controls the present, controls the past.
He who controls the past, controls the future

[Milu]

We could always become fahrenheit 451 (the book, the film - titled after the burning point of paper) and the book people.

What book would you choose? I think I'd choose Shibumi by Trevanian but I'd want to edit it a little

[natcherly]

... I think I'd choose Shibumi by Trevanian but I'd want to edit it a little

Trevanian took great umbrage with those who messed with his work. His reaction to what Hollywood did to the Eiger Sanction is illustrative. Needless to say, Shibumi never appeared in a Readers Digest Condensed Book collection.

For a compact yet revealing commentary on what is going down these days, I would pick Animal Farm, another George Orwell classic. Lots of fun fitting current politicos to the the characters in that book.

[Phil Elmore]

But I liked The Eiger Sanction.

[natcherly]

But I liked The Eiger Sanction.

Me too; however, Mr. T did not. Wholly predictable given his uncompromising and hyper critical world view. One wonders just what he was expecting after getting that big check from an institution that represented many of the things he found distressing in modern society.