Ebooks offer perfect solution to the problem of banned books!
All this talk about banned books (see my posts here and here about the controversy surrounding Republican VP pick Sarah Palin), got me thinking about ways to prevent books from being banned. There’s nothing worse than a government trying to censor what the public reads. Books are meant to be read.
And as many of you know, I’m a huge fan of ebooks. So I did a little research into how ebooks can help prevent those who want to ban books from public libraries, bookstores and other places, like Sarah Palin did, and keep books available for anyone to read. When you think about it, ebooks really are a perfect solution to keeping the power of choice firmly in the hands of the reader, where it belongs.
I came across this post from Epublishers Weekly from earlier this year that outlines 30 benefits of ebooks over print. And sure enough, at # 37, they hit the nail on the head:
Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned: Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. Wonder Stories by H.C. Andersen. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses
by James Joyce. … Many of these books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries, bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right to read.
Basically, print books can be physically destroyed and kept from the shelves in bookstores and libraries. In smaller communities, where their might only be one or two places within reasonable distance for the public to obtain books, a book being banned by a public official (such as a Mayor trying to throw her beliefs onto the public) could easily mean that the reading public must do without.
But with ebooks, they do not exist in physical form. There is no book to burn, destroy or keep off the shelves. If one website doesn’t have the book you’re looking for, then simply go to another website that does. You are free to download books to your heart’s content!
This probably irritates the hell out of people like Sarah Palin, who would rather not have certain books available to the public. But I have always maintained, if you find a book offensive, then don’t buy/check out/read it. Tell your children they can’t read it either. The rules you lay down in your own home is your business. That is your choice. And that is what books and the free flow of information really boils down to, choice.
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Read More: Censorship, eBooks, Literary News, Reading
