E-Books Are Cool, But They Have Drawbacks. For One Thing, They're Exactly Like Hitler.

On Monday I wrote about the new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, called the Nook, and how it is part of a larger strategy by the bookseller to topple Amazon. Now the Nook is official, and hardwarewise, it certainly makes the Kindle seem even dowdier and less exciting than it already did, if that's even possible.

No doubt Amazon will hit back with an even better Kindle next time around, and then Apple will weigh in with its rumored Nook'nKindle killer tablet in a few months─and so it goes. The good news is, all this competition will mean better (and cheaper) devices and e-books for all of us. If there was ever a doubt that e-books would eventually go mainstream, that's now been settled.

Yet there are those who still have doubts about leaving paper behind. Some of the misgivings about e-books are easy to understand. The e-readers and a lot of the books themselves still cost too much; and most commercial e-books are shackled with stupid DRM restrictions that severely limit the way customers can use them, much the way MP3s were once locked up before record labels finally realized they were fighting a losing battle.

But now comes a new complaint about e-books that, I must admit, had never occurred to me before: They are the equivalent of Nazis. In the October issue of the Evergreen Review, novelist and poet Alan Kaufman writes that the promoters of e-books are plotting to kill paper books the way Hitler plotted to kill Jews. He goes on to say that─wait, you know what? I can't do justice to the sublime lunacy of this piece by paraphrasing. Excerpts:

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists [sic] tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

... As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven.

At this point one might point out that no one is arguing that paper books should be abolished. One might also note the irony of Kaufman's choice of forum, using a magazine Web site to rave against the evils of reading on a screen. But one senses Kaufman does not have much of an ear for irony.

Instead, let us return to the text for his rousing conclusion. The spread of e-books is, he writes, "... a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human."

Well, OK. But the Nook has a color touchscreen, which you have to admit is pretty slick.