Discussions give readers the opportunity to grapple with themes suggested by readme moderators. These discussions are about books, authors and new media.

[ 11.12.2009 ]

If everything new is of the devil’s making, then technical advances must, at the very least, be compared with SS troops; a simple calculation, based on a certain kind of cultural pessimism, which can be arrived at in fractions of a second. And it makes absolute sense to all those who casually spout Hitler comparisons in response to a weakly brewed morning cup of coffee.

An equally simple calculation is at the bottom of the assessment that an ever-growing online trade is not necessarily conducive to the business of small corner shops. Though to work this out, you don’t have to do much more than add one and one. It’s nicely monocausal and unidirectional, and enables us once again to grasp this world, which is growing ever more complicated.

To speak of a plague might indeed be fitting when your favourite bookshops are closing one after another owing to changing market conditions. Certainly, everyone’s now buying online or – even worse – exclusively digital products. And so both the Orient and the Occident move irrevocably towards their downfall. The great swansong for all human culture is, in light of the advent of e-books, now being intoned as skilfully as it was at the invention of the telephone or the television.

Nevertheless, it is highly peculiar and a huge distortion of history when the digitization of books is equated with the deportation of Jews during the Third Reich (the ‘massive deportation of literary texts’) and compared with November 1938 (‘a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the world of literacy’), or used to conjure up a veritable book holocaust – as done by Alan Kaufman in a recent essay.

‘Der Jude is now Der Book’, the New York author and son of a Holocaust survivor wrote in the 120th issue of - and how’s this for a little irony on the side – the online magazine the Evergreen Review. Entitled ‘The Electronic Book Burning’, the text defends books made of paper, damns the internet and hi-tech pogroms, and comes to the conclusion that transferring texts to electronic formats amounts to the systematic extermination of all humankind.

With this provocation, Kaufman has certainly not done the cause of defending p-books as an inviolable cultural sanctum any favours. But he has apparently been heard all the same. And by Amazon of all things. After a report in The Sunday Times, rumours began circulating that the online trade giant was now looking around for premises in British inner cities where it could open some bona fide analogue shops, so to speak, of real flesh and blood and paper.

Amazon promptly denied these plans, and yet a calculation that mixes online and offline shopping seems to be more and more attractive (and this is also true for the small corner shop). Hence, in the meantime, it’s not hard to imagine Amazon shops along the same lines as the emporium that Amazon has turned into over its years on the internet, selling not only p-books and CDs, but with all kinds of consumer electronics in their inventory. Chief among them would be the enterprise’s current bestseller: the Kindle. Some just call it an e-reader; others, the final solution.