Dogeared Pages Redux, Bookmark Hacks and Medium vs Message
Dav Yaginuma wrote to tell me about his
new bookmark as an alternative to dogearing books
As we all know, I'm a notorious dogear user and have offended many a bibliophile by my folding of corners. I think I'll give this a try and see how it goes.
While I still contend that many of the biggest advocates of revering books tend to get their reverence of the text and of the physical object mixed up a bit. You can read the long litany of comments to see more of my thoughts on what constitutes respect of books, but the simple statement that "book" as a medium and the content distributed via that medium are NOT the same thing.
I will defend to the death the freedom of the press and text content. I believe that government censorship of the press is the single biggest method of oppression available to governments. I've taken to saying:
"A post 9-11 world is still a post 1776 world."
because I don't agree with suppressing huge amounts of information in the name of "safety". Reclassifying documents on the Korean War smacks of the exact same kind of secrecy throughout history that caused so many problems.
I feel VERY strongly about how we should protect content and ensure that it's available. However, in a digital age, ensuring that content is available is best served by digital versions and not in reverence of the printed copy.
So, to me, the treatment of books as objects has moved to the same category as stamps. They can be beautiful works of art, collected and treated with tremendous respect. However, most are just used to serve a specific purpose and discarded.
If you find yourself getting hot under the collar on this topic with me, ask yourself whether, if the book contained nothing but random characters, with no readable text, you would still feel the same way about it. If so, you're argument is about the object and not about censorship or bookburning or any other loaded free speech issue. Instead, it's more akin to how well you treat your DVD's and CD's.
