I mentioned this item during my talk today. What oh what will poor people do if we have no books? What happens to them if we close down the libraries? "Imagine Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin, raised in poverty, self-taught from a small cache of books, being stymied in his early education by the lack of an e-reader." Let's leave aside the fact that you can buy an e-reader with a library of classics for a hundred dollars or so, an amount in today's dollars equivalent to what Lincoln would have paid for just one book. Today's impoverished Lincoln or Dylan would simply walk down to the local Community Access Point and take advantage of the billions of works online (a collection that includes every classic novel, most newspapers and magazines, and of course my own website). How ridiculous to overpay to buy and store paper books when far better access can be provided electronically. Don't be fooled by the publishers' last-gasp locked-down ebooks. They aren't the future. Open (or at least, very inexpensive) access is.
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