Culture

The Digitization Of Classic Books May Lead To A Dangerous Form Of Censorship

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In most situations it is not technology itself that is the problem, but rather how that technology is used.  Motivations and objectives of the users matter far more than the medium.  Consider the so-called “digitization” of books:  we can say that it has the potential both for good and evil.  On the hand, its proponents can praise the fact that the digitization of old or rare books has made them available to more people than ever before.  There is merit to this view.

Consider the project to make available the brilliantly illuminated Book of Kells, a masterpiece of medieval artistry.  Digital databases now make available a tremendous number of old books to more people than ever before.  On the surface, this sounds like an unqualified success; only a fool, proponents of digitization would say, would object to this kind of progress in the dissemination of knowledge.  Yet we should always be mindful of the fact that technology is not—or should not—be seen as “good” for its own sake.  Unless it is employed to serve a good end, it can only be seen as a neutral tool.  In the wrong hands it can be an unqualified evil.

These were some of the thoughts that came to mind when I recently read an article about how some universities are abandoning book collections in favor of completely online digital databases.  The article relates how the University of California at Berkeley is seeking to “meet the needs of the 21st century student” by slowly phasing out physical copies of books.  One student interviewed even said he had never checked out a book from the library.  Of course, this shift was presented like a step in the right direction, a bold leap into the modern world where everything would be at everyone’s fingertips.

Of course it was.  Every time institutions or authorities seek to curtail our freedom or access to information, such moves are portrayed as advances that are “helping” us or that are giving us more “freedom.”  The author of the article notes that most of the best materials are not digitized.  Not only this, but online databases can contain a large amount of low-grade information.  Perhaps most chilling of all is the fact that converting everything to a digital format makes it far easier for authorities to control the historical record.  The Berkeley library article, cited above, made this chilling observation:

Ignoring these older physical media, Dixon argues, is “erasing the past,” until every scrap of information is online. And even then, there are other potential problems. The removal of 60 percent of the physical collection at the science library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for instance, caused an uproar after it was reported that many of the books removed had been destroyed. A campus spokesman said that nothing had been lost from the scholarly record, since duplicates were retained in other libraries or available online. Given the short timeframe and seeming lack of consultation of the faculty, however, many critics expressed doubts that this was actually the case.

There it is:  many of the books removed had been destroyed.  So here we see the other big problem in digitization:  the lack of accountability that the alleged work is being done.  How can we be sure that these institutions are actually scanning the books that they claim to be scanning?  Who is monitoring them?  Are we willing to trust them for this task?  I for one am not.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they actually do what they say they will do.  Suppose they do scan or digitize entire libraries.  What then?  Will it not be far, far easier for systems of authority to control or manipulate access to historical information?  How can we be sure that the University of California will not one day decide to prevent access to all works written before 1950 as being “offensive” or not in tune with political correctness?  You may laugh at this, or call me an alarmist, but I am not so sure.  When it comes to our precious cultural heritage, we cannot place our faith in the same institutions that have been betraying that same heritage for the past forty years.

Seen from this perspective, digitization becomes a stealth technique of censorship.  In the future, systems of power and control will not physically throw books into the bonfire; such symbolism would not suit the overlords of political correctness.  But they will try to consign our heritage to oblivion in subtler, more devious ways.  One can imagine a scenario like this unfolding:

1. Libraries and universities announce that they need to “free up more space” and make libraries “more accessible and welcoming” to a dumbed-down population too addicted to smart phones to know or care about anything beyond them.  As in the assault on privacy, this will be done in a way that make the authorities look like they are trying to help us.

2. Political “leaders” mouth platitudes about expanding our “right to choose” and our “freedom of choice” and link this to the push to digitize all physical books they can get their hands on. No agencies or independent monitors are put in place to see that the books are being properly digitized.  No one is checking to see what actually becomes of the old books once they are digitized.

3. The modern “library” now becomes a recreational space populated by homeless vagrants, gamers, and screaming young children.  (Recall that the Roman forum in classical times was the scene of political debate but became in the Middle Ages a place for grazing cows).  The only “books” available on the shelves are those in tune with political correctness.  Older books—known to contain dangerous ideas—have been “digitized” and are (in theory) able to be accessed.  But the fact that they are so squirreled away makes it unlikely that anyone can find them or easily use them.

4. The gatekeepers of the digital databases now begin to do the unforgivable: they start, in subtle ways, to tamper with the digital databases.  Sentences vanish from books.  Pages vanish from books.  Some books become “illegible” slowly and surely.  Rogue librarians take it upon themselves to purge or condense books they don’t like.  As the years go by, it becomes harder and harder to locate titles that are deemed “triggering” or “distasteful.”  All of this, of course, is done under the guise of “helping” you or making life “easier” for you.

5.  The keepers of the databases being to monitor and restrict access to their data.  Roadblocks are put in place to deter seekers of knowledge about certain periods of history.  Passwords and other forms of “authentication” are slowly put into place to restrict access.  Your passwords can be revoked at any time, and thus your ability to learn can be monitored and revoked at any time.

6. Even if there is no overt tampering with data, digital databases are subject to easy destruction by weather, fire, electromagnetic fields, or human error. Physical books, by contrast, are much more difficult to destroy.

If all of this seems farfetched or absurd, think again.  Some of the great classics of antiquity survived only in a few neglected manuscripts.  In the case of the historians Tacitus or Velleius Paterculus, there was only one single manuscript that survived.  When people no longer care about preserving their cultural heritage, it will inevitably be neglected.  Monks in the Middle Ages used precious manuscript leaves for prayer-books because they did not care about what was written on the vellum or parchment.  In the same way, some of the monuments of ancient Rome were cannibalized to build churches.   The point is that someone has to stand guard over knowledge and information and prevent its destruction through neglect or malice.  We have been far too willing to accept digitization of physical books without thinking of the inevitable consequences.

For me there is no substitute for a physical book.  One of the older books I own is a history of New England published in 1798 in Boston.  It was dedicated to president John Adams.  Even after 220 years, it is still in good condition.  The paper used in those days was high-quality, acid-free rag paper.  When you hold it up to the light, you can see how strong it is; books published today just can’t compare to the beauty and durability of very old books.  After all these years, it has not faded much, and the paper is not very yellowed.

Does anyone have confidence that our digital databases will still be around in 200 years?  We can’t even read emails written 20 years ago.  We should be very suspicious of digitization.  I understand that we can’t stop the flow of technology; but we can hold our institutions to account.  We must be willing to sound the alarm when the inevitable attack on the historical record begins.  And make no mistake:  the attack is coming.  In some ways it is already here, as the article cited above demonstrates.  In the meantime, buy physical books, and marvel at their beauty.

Read More:  Relentless Media Censorship Is Bringing Us A Fate Worse Than Big Brother

166 thoughts on “The Digitization Of Classic Books May Lead To A Dangerous Form Of Censorship”

  1. Do what I do, use your library and if you really like the book buy a hardback copy. That way I only spend money on books that are worth it. Your library will also have periodic book sales where you can rack up on books for pennies on the dollar.

    1. Amen, I started to buy them by the kilogram. Reading 7 books per month is good for the brain.

      1. The cool thing is that since generation Buttplug is rebuking the classics, finding a srcond hand classic to purchase is easier today.

      1. Pity the thing is so loud…
        On the other hand – picture the magnificent herd of robot dogs, racing across the plain, their approach heralded by the whining of their motors.

        1. Imagine an Abrams tank on legs, except there is nothing inside it, except maybe a ton of high explosives.

      2. Nothing replaces my dog, nothing. That cold metal monster might be good for jogging and defense, but it lacks the essential element of soul that a dog does and will always possess.

        1. “You can kill dreams. You can kill innocence. You can kill freedom, but YOU CAN’T KILL PROGRESS”

        2. The CIA can’t hack my dog and spy on me (that I know of). . . Dogs can run without batteries and recharging. . . and I’m sure there are a million more reasons man’s best friend will always retain that title.

      4. This looks far suprior to the dogs we currently have.

    2. Hardware (1990) a movie where a killer robot, created by the Government for the purpose of population control, murder people by injecting poison mixed with morphine.

  3. Don’t worry. At the rate things are going, in the future students won’t be able to read anyways.

    2. This is why I donate my time reading to the deaf

      2. And I wasn’t laughing about the joke, I was laughing about you donating time.

      3. I suppose that’s better than spending your free time with the Temporally Incognizant.. Those guys never seem to appreciate the effort.

      5. Nice. I do some paintings for the blind, but it’s hit or miss, when I have time.

  4. On a somewhat related issue, in grade school, back in the late 60’s/early 70’s, my class was assigned to read “Lord of the Flies”. Instead of buying a new copy for the class, I relied on an older copy from our home library (possibly used by an older sibling.) The teacher was having kids read from the book aloud in class. In chapter 11, “Castle Rock” there is a sentence where Piggy says, which some other reader spoke aloud while I was reading along, “Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is?” I mentally started alert. MY copy did not say “painted Indians.” My copy used a word that begins with “n”. The various online PDFs I’ve just casually searched all have “painted Indians” in the text.

    1. I just did a quick Google search on this anecdote from my youth and found this from Wikiqotes.
      Ch. 11: Castle Rock – The first edition used the term “painted niggers”, later editions changed this to “painted savages” or “painted Indians”.
      https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Golding

      1. If you have a first edition print verision, that might be worth something to a collector.

        1. The book was in my parents’ house 45+ years ago. It’s probably long gone.

  5. The computer is the single greatest feminizing force in society today. Machines that are “user friendly” are electro-plastic seductresses. We already have too much information. We need to use what we’ve got.

    2. True, how many Christians do you think read the Bible from cover to cover? I think I am a minority in that regard. Still, I think I forgot a good third of it.

      1. Very few. One of my favorite pastors commented on this topic and how he noticed a family he visited had the Bible in their restroom. “He had a spare minute!”, he exclaimed. Sadly, that’s probably more than most professing believers read or study.

      2. I’ve made a moderate lifetime study of just the works of Paul. There’s so much more to the Bible, but the density of wisdom (that is, wisdom per word) is higher than just about any other book I’ve ever seen.
        That said, I can say that I’ve read everything but the Minor Prophets and Ezekiel (just wasn’t ready for wheels within wheels). That already puts me above a great many pastors, much less laity.
        It’s a tragedy. A man could spend every second for a hundred years meditating on the Bible without grasping a fraction of the wisdom contained therein.

        1. I have, but only because we make it part of a daily ritual as a family. Bible in the morning, Book of Mormon at night. Been doing that since we got married.

        2. The bible is a bunch of inaccurate horseshit for the most part. There’s more truth in one page of my quantum mechanics textbook than there is in the whole bible.

        4. Well, that didn’t really come out of nowhere. I was raised Southern Baptist, and read the entire bible multiple times. Basically forced to believe it, more than once my parents said, “don’t ask questions, just believe”.
          I think that is where I have an issue, the people that state the bible is the literal truth, when that is pretty easily disproven with biology, geology, physics, ect.
          If someone just believes it as a religious text and doesn’t try to push crap like intelligent design and a 6000 year old earth, I don’t have as much of an issue with it.

        5. I’ve studied the arguments for both sides of this issue, and my conclusion is that intelligent design, at the very least, is more consistent with what we know of physical phenomena than the alternatives. But, again, neither here nor there.
          On a semi-related note, you broke my statistics. I’ve reached 301 Catholic, 3 Methodist, and 1 Lutheran atheists, but now I have to add a Southern Baptist to that chart. Catholic apostates still in the lead, but these anecdotal numbers are interesting to me.

        6. I’m actually agnostic. I don’t think science will ever be able to disprove or prove God exists. I do believe it is certainly possible.
          I more have issues with the provenance of religious claims. Not that there is no wisdom at all in the bible. Perhaps I came off too harshly. I think it does contain a lot of good stuff.
          The few times I tried to argue and question my dad about the bible, I was beaten pretty severely. The don’t ask questions just believe thing was pretty much the rule in my home and church, even when I would read things that were glaringly obviously false(the flood, lack of rain until then, which isn’t how the water cycle works, ect).

    3. Not all computers are user friendly unless you’re talking about Apple.

    1. well that’s really just an opportunity for an enterprising individual to go ahead and publish the Collected Racial Slurs of Mark Twain. In two luxuriously bound volumes

      1. Only two? Everything is a “series” nowadays we have to stretch that out to at least three books.

    2. That’s bullshit. Classics should not be touched. People aren’t even bright enough to read them on their own.

    3. I’ve noticed that they censored parts of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, especially the ones with Yosemite Sam.

      1. They’ve taken most of the highly offensive ones out of circulation

      2. There are about 20 censored Tom and Jerry cartoons.
        The strangest Tom and Jerry censorship was ………..
        1950 Saturday Evening Puss featured a black card playing Mammy
        In 1960 they got Chuck Jones to replace back Mammy with a white teen girl.
        From 1970 to 2010 it was very hard to find the Black Mammy version.
        From 2015+ it became almost impossible to find the White Teen version.

      3. Froghorn Leghorn is all but erased from history because he was a caricature of a dumb southern black man, as are any of the one-off vignettes that featured a humanized animal behaving like a stereotypical black man from the early 20th century. Popeye cartoons are also gone.

        2. He was based on a Senator at the time actually, not a poor black southern man.

        3. If I take a pick at cartoons that are played in Greece….
          They still use some of the most racist ones that were made in the U.S.!
          We might be dump socialists but at the very least the anti-racist culture only very recently did hit us… and it mostly has to do with muslims and turks…. When you vote leftists they alway support you enemies.

      4. Are you telling me the old rooster was blotted out because some retarded faggot thought it was insensitive? Wow, now we know the decline is here and 1984 is alive and well.

      6. Which Yosemite Sams in particular? What’s offensive about HIM?

    5. WTF? Had no idea this makes me angry. How can one read Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer without their contemporary language which included the “N Word” all 219 time sf in the book..
      People that censor and re-edit classics are like child molester they should be exterminated!
      I bet the Globalists would love to pull 1984 from the shelves. They’re no better than pedarists.

      1. No, not “N word”. “Nigger”. Not to be cool or hip or racist, but because it is the word and we are men, not 2 year olds talking dirty when mother’s back is turned. I believe the same for all other “letter-word” idiocy.

    6. That kind of defeats the point that Mark Twain was trying to convey about language used by whites towards blacks in that era. Huck Finn was not a bigot he used the terminology for blacks by people of his generation and his background.

      1. Just like with banning the Confederate Battle Flag and tearing down Civil War monuments in the south, or for the first time in its 30 plus years of airplay radio stations just now starting to mute the word “faggot” from the song “Money for Nothing”, editing Twain allows the left to apply modern day standards of “morality” to events, ideas, and people of the past in order to revise history to their liking.

        1. That whole lyric no longer exists in “Money for Nothing” I’ve noticed. Such bullshit.

      2. Yep. But the left is about “wordz and feelz” not “intellectual intent” or “reason”. They don’t care about the “point” they just get triggered, like the little bitches that they are intellectually.

    7. They better have excluded the slang “briar” in “The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” or they’re being wwaaaaaaysist!

    8. I have first editions of Twain, and they aren’t going away. Not all of them (I wish) but at a minimum Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Traveling Abroad. Even have a letter from him to his wife and family when he was traveling. Same for Tennyson and a few other greats.
      The nice thing about books is that if you learn to store and preserve them properly, they’ll last for centuries. Meanwhile, hard drive wipes and IOS reboots to “original” are an all too common occurrence.

      1. Magnetic media will lost it´s magnetic properties and Optical media degrade with time. 40 years old CD are being destroyed by fungus, Then you have other problem, the technology to read the media availability try to find a betamax machine in 100 years then try to find a TV with composite or coaxial inputs also New paper is crap it won´t last centuries either.

    10. Are you serious? Holy fuck. Is this being done by all publisher’s of Twain? Or are there still some that are keeping the original?

        1. Huck Finn always was on the frontline on this issue. When they start re-writing this book and it will be the tip of the iceberg of fuckloads more rewriting across the board to come.

  7. It’s been about 1 year since I started to buy books in bulk at flea markets to preserve them in my library (only 1€ or 2€ each, yay!) .
    They’re mostly non-narrative from the ’80s & ’90s, so much more informative and better written than any wikipedia article or “tutorial” on Youtube.

  8. “WORDS, Mister Wordsworth!”
    Police State Chorus: “obsolete, obsolete, obsolete…”
    You were ahead of your time, Rod Serling.

  9. Of course the pawns of (((them))) will edit these to rule out anything showing originality and abstract genius from the minds of white men.
    By the time these are printed in twenty years from now if this agenda is still running amok, Charles Dickens will be a tranny, Herman Melville will be a black bugger, Shakespeare will be a wymyn, and Mark Twain will be a muslim cleric. Each one of their stories will reflect their new form. Oliver twist will be about little orphan boys pretending to be girls, Moby Dick will be about a shamanistic Ahab looking for his lost love, the great black whale (cuz can’t hab great and white appear in da same sentence, dats gross and rayciss), Hamlette will be about a psychotic princess of Denmark cuckolding the court to outsiders, and the adventures of Tom Sawyer will now be applauding the beheading of infidels as Tom Al-sawyer and Huckleberry Finnladen sail down the nile in their camel canoe.

        1. sorry man….revenge from that string champion put out this morning.

        2. Those were a boner killer this morning and I was able to focus on my work today. Now this? Early night for me I guess.

        3. Hey, if you have the right mindset, it will help you. Spend the day looking at 2’s and 3’s, then go home to your #6 wife, and things are decent. Think of it as anti-porn.

        4. Ha ha! I aim to please, Jim! I got a lot more where that came from!

      2. I bet even the brave little guy from David Garett Brown’s avatar wouldn’t accept that challenge.

    2. In fact they are already working of that; there are stupid theories that say Shakespeare never existed as a person….
      I finished re reading Macbeth a little while ago, in a cheap paperback Penguin edition, and the author of the preliminary study (some bitch) was making a ‘feminist’ interpretation of Macbeth.

      1. I listened to a BBC production of Macbeth a while back. The climax of the play is fantastic when performed.
        Of course, I have a bit of family history with ol’ Macbeth: somewhat related to Banquo via Clan Stewart, you see.

    3. Moby dick book is very very gay, Herman Melville was a closet homosexual or that the impression I get from the book I read. The book is full of innuendo and he is obsessed with the word erected. So are you telling me that there is a non gay version??!!
      “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
      till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
      strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
      squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
      gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
      feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
      squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as
      much as to say, – Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer
      cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!
      Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves
      into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk
      and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for
      ever!” (Moby Dick Kindle 6450)

  10. Let’s say it all together – Fahrenheit 451.
    Science fiction is rapidly becoming nightmarish science fact.

  11. You can pirate ebooks. The critical ones are already on the web and in many peoples external hard drives safe from censorship.

    1. I wouldn’t be so sure. They could potentially make your OS or whatever app you use to read it censor those words.

      1. If that ever happens, we will have no choice but to mass-migrate to linux.

        2. I think it’s just a matter of time. By now I think they know only a minority of its customers has some sort of digital library with classics.

      2. If I remember right the IRC Highway has e-books in even raw .txt format. Been years since I went on it to get a rare Tesla autobiography.

        2. I forget the title and don’t have access to my archives ATM. It was written in’32, when he expressed his regret of choosing celibacy.

    2. On a book shelf is better unless we get to a farenheit 451 situation IMO

  12. Taking away the quality historic and red pill reads is the same as if someone forced you to read the local Time-Warner or fishwrap newspaper. I look at the local newspaper every now and then and every time it’s worse than CNN. It borders on NPR.
    Now imagine being forced to read it like a setup in Clockwork Orange with your eyes wired open. That’s what it’s like having your quality red pill reads censored or restricted. It’s just like being strapped down like a monkey and then having the most idiotic morons in your community who are favorites on the editorial page gather around your gurney and all begin yelling their socialist drivel into your face.
    Being denied the good is just like being force fed a bunch of shit.

  13. I’ve gone mostly digital. I only have so much bookshelf space, so I only buy a physical book if it’s rare, special, or I REALLY want it and there is no other option. My oldest physical book is from the late 19th century, but I have a digitization of a first hand account of the Boston Tea Party in my Calibre library.
    While “The Establishment” can easily use digitization to deliberately hide knowledge, what is to stop us from our own digitization and collection program?
    Without digitization, the next time a “Library of Alexandria” happens, where ignorant savages burn all the contents of a library, all of it could be lost.

    1. I think the concern is that all libraries will either become digitized or removed altogether since you will be able to access any book with your cell phone. Once all books are digitized and hard copies are destroyed all information will be controlled by a small minority. In the worst case scenario all that information gets destroyed or becomes inaccessible to the masses. We will have a “Library of Alexandria” on a global scale.

      1. Yes and with no libraries where will socially awkward tweens, violent homeless people, child molesters and the elderly go at 2 in the afternoon on wednesdays?

  14. Digitization is both a blessing an a curse. It is a blessing because I have found really rare Nationalsocialists literature from the III Reich scanned by Universities and (the irony) Google. I think that they just do it by the pound and don’t speak Deutsch.

    1. That’s why it’s all stone tablets and cave drawings for the kneeman. I’m keeping it real.

    2. Which one is harder to do?
      a. just pushing a button and automatically removing certain words through algorithms in just mere seconds and afterwards applying the modification to all the customers on Kindle, having their editions swiftly replaced….
      b. Jump through all the hoops and have a second edition reprint and put on the shelves while the first one is still in the hands and shelves of all those fortunate enough to buy in the first place…

  16. Imagine what they would do to Roosh’s book “Bang” since it is already in digital format?

    1. They’d remove the g from the title and all the pages would be blank?

  17. I wish I could find a copy of Germany’s National Vice somewhere. I don’t think it’s ever going digital.

  18. Didnt amazon delete books from people’s kindles a few years ago? It was all a “mistake”, and the books were restored? They can tell which passages you highlight btw, but nothing to see there…buy a book made of trees plees, you’ll thank me for it later…

  19. Reading is one thing. But wait until they outlaw the base 10 number system and teach only the Roman numeral system in the plebe training classes. Once the farm animals all have implanted sensory communication, the nanotech will be upgraded automatically and a few select hired gun engineers will run systems management. Most nitwit social media addicts no longer use base 10 to figure anything as it stands. The Roman numeral system is neither base 5 or 6. It makes simple arithmatic more difficult than your fingers believe it or not. And forget multiplication or calculus – no way. It was designed that way, believe it. It’s a dead ‘toe tag’ system only good for sequential numbering, counting or assigning AN IDENTIFICATION NUMBER on goods, parcels OR PEOPLE.

    1. I’ve done that. One version of one of my programming books contained errors (fun fact: code doesn’t translate to ebook easily), so I just went ahead and changed it.
      A few minutes later, everyone who picked up a copy of the first edition ebook had silently had it replaced by the second edition.

    1. Save that shit. Lots of it is worth some serious money if you have really old stuff. I’m sure you know that of course.

  22. As much as I enjoy having the latest technology, I always have and always will prefer actual books to e-books.

    1. Yeah man, there’s a lot of both tangible & intangible qualities that make printed books superior. It’s like the difference between crab meat & krab meat.

    2. Easy if you only have 10 books, but I have thousands and now they are all digitized and stored in at least 3 places.

      1. Easy if you only have 10 books. . .

        You must not be a woman in RL. . . lol

    3. I see a place for both. If the power is out, or you’re sitting on the crapper, having a tangible book is … it’s hard to describe. It’s real, it’s comforting, it feels eternal. On the other hand, traveling is a place where I use and love my e-books. I have hundreds and hundreds, and it’s convenient to have that number in less than the weight and bulk of a single hardbound book.

      1. The traveling argument is valid. I have a Kindle that gets used for everything but e-reading. It started out that way, but when I travel now I use audio books. I can put them on my smartphone (which I’m already carrying anyway) and listen to them. This allows me to drown out the inevitable crying baby during flights and I can listen to them while driving as well. I’ve traveled a lot, and the more I do, the more I look for ways to minimize what I bring.

  23. Digital media is easy to manipulate, but print is ever static.
    It’s like the internet media folks saying Trump’s father was the son of a German immigrant, when pappy Trump was actually from Sweden.

  24. Excellent Article Quintus!!! BRAVO! It’s articles like this that make you want to come back to this site over and over again! There is absolutely no substitute for reading on paper. Staring into a computer screen will never compare to reclining in a leather club chair with your beverage of choice and savoring the words of great minds.

      2. It’s a good article, but maybe you should be careful about spreading these memes too far. You have some level of influence over small wars journal, who are almost normies, and at the same time you are opening a can of worms by politicizing digitization, which the neo-reactionary movement relies on. If you make this political, and word gets back to a leftist, you might end up destroying that movement. Maybe that’s your goal, which I can respect. In either case, please delete this on reading it.

  25. “…digital databases are subject to easy destruction by weather, fire, electromagnetic fields, or human error. Physical books, by contrast, are much more difficult to destroy.”
    Physical books can be destroyed by earth, air, fire, water, human error, and plain old age. (Most modern books are made on such acidic paper that they disintegrate in about three decades.)
    Bad argument.

    1. Pulp crap, sure. But time tested books, I guess, is the question. Are they too being destroyed? That would not be good.
      Of course books can be destroyed by nature, but that’s by accident and chance. Humans doing it is by intent, and not a good thing. I’m assuming you disapprove of book burnings here of course…

  27. I see where you going with this. Narrative dominance or censorship can effectively be fought with fragmentation of mainstream. This means questioning or undermining all established ideologies.
    The only way evil can triumph is when good men do nothing.

  28. I encourage everyone at Return of Kings to purchase at least a few books for your own. Start by acquiring esoteric older ones from before 1965. That way we can save the legacy of the West from digital tampering.
    Oh and I too have full faith in the people who maintain and “own” the digital collections of texts we have. It’s not like they would lie to us in say, the way Obamacare has made America a “better” country.

  30. We need a book revolution banning the use of electronic devices for education. Whos with me?

  31. I thought long and hard about this about ten years ago, and I started to wonder if the same thing happened to civilizations like Egypt. Sure, they had papyrus to write things in, but that medium decays extremely quickly and is easily replaced. Perhaps that’s why they wrote so much onto the interior of the pyramids – they knew eventually someone would break in, and right there would be unmodified text..
    Heck, who’s to say the Egyptians didn’t have digital libraries? Sure, it’s a ridiculous reach, but not a lot of computers can read floppy disks or tapes anymore. Words etched in a safe environment endure, but digital becomes unreadable and/or corrupted in time.
    I imagine that, in the distant future, someone will thank one of us for preserving a copy of a then ancient text from destruction.

  32. The Digitization Of Classic Books May Lead To A Dangerous Form Of Censorship?
    Just depends who’s who’s doing the digitization ??

  33. Very cool and hipster ROK! Way to “keep it real” looking forward to future articles like “I don’t use digital cameras becise I enjoy the tactile experience of devloping my own film” or “why the Fender Jaguar is the greatest guitar ever made” or the new series “pfft you probably never even heard of it” featuring Indy music from the 1970’s, hopelessly dated technology, 18th century’s children’s toys and vegetable recipies you are totally missing out on inlcluding a killer piece called “Buttered Ramps: Pffft you probably never even heard of it.”
    Can I also assume that ROK will be opening up a craft brewery / ironic t shirt company in Williamsburg soon?
    Maybe being anti leftist is just the new hipster fad and I’ve totally missed the point of this website (ugh ‘natch!).

    1. Don’t forget modern medicine. It’s sooo last century.
      😉

      1. all the kids that survive not being vaccinated do just fine

    2. That’s a bit myopic. While there is legitimacy to your point, his thought that basically throwing away all paper copies is valid as well. If only digital copies of literature are found in the future then this makes changing content subtly over time really, really easy. It’s not like governments have ever had a history of propaganda, right?

      1. Nonone is going to throw away every paper copy of every book. However, at this point they should be making them so prohibitively expensive that only passionate collectors would even bother
        In the meantime I downloaded the entire western canon of both fiction and non fiction and loaded it up into a program called caliber. It was free. The download took a few hours and now I have all the books.
        These absurd people talking about the feel of holding a book make me laugh. Why not just go back to a typewriter. A chisel? More hipster noise.
        Also, I think there is far more propaganda about the governments proganda than actually propaganda.
        Aside from cool hipster articles like his one I’ve been noticing a rapid collapse into the paranoid delusional realm of Return of Tinfoil but I guess that’s a topic for another day.
        In the meantime, e-books are here to stay and 70% of the pulp in the libraries and probably 95% of the pulp being pumped out now would serve better as mulch

    3. Yes, because there’s nothing better than centralized knowledge, what’s not to like about a more efficient cloud-enabled 1984 editing style?
      Sorry I’d rather keep the classics in hard format, the rest (programming,etc.) in digital…

      1. So keep them. No one is telling you not to. I think it is silly. I was so happy when I dumped all my lolbooks. You can read the classics on an iPad as well as anywhere else. If you want to have a book collection then that’s great. People are free to spend their money on what little hobbies make them happy. But that copy of whatever sitting there on your self, short of bringing you pleasure, isn’t worth dick

        1. You are too smart to use such strawman arguments. No one here (Neither the author nor me) is talking about stopping digitalization of books. Hell, I probably have as many if not more digital books and documents than you (on account of my relative youth). However the point of the article is that uncritical acceptance of book digitalization and eventual centralization of knowledge (the cloud, Kindle and similar devices/platforms with unlimited edition capabilities, always connected to the web whether you want it or not….) with the concomitant mandatory phasing out of conventional books is stupid and dangerous, specially for a public institution commissioned with the protection and diffusion of knowledge….
          I’d rather everyone has the opportunity to enjoy the classics just like I have than being the only guy who could read Dostoyevsky uncensored in a 1000 km radius. As it happens with any political system that relies on the tacit or public acceptance of the governed (either Republic, Monarchy or Democracy) the best way to keep the free market free is a vigilant public. A dumb public will ensure an unfree market where options are limited and monopolies are the rule of the land….
          As for the last part you are right, if the book content doesn’t bring me pleasure or amusement it’s not on my shelf…hence only classics and very good novels are hardcopy.

        2. I think a centralized database of ebooks that anyone can access for free would be amazing. I have a lot more than most as I am a bit of a digital horner. I have literally every book written in English, every comic book, everything. I get these huge 500gb torrents of books dating all the way back to 500 BCE. I also have shit ton of books in French and German as well as pretty much the entire Loeb collection in Ancient Greek. That doesn’t even start on the movies and music. Digital hording is kind of a hobby of mine.
          As for reading Dostoyevsky uncensored….how is your Russian because you are most likely reading through a translator…which is fine but still divorces you from the authors words….as does, by the way, the change in the books meaning which happened organically over time. Your copy of Karamozov on the shelf..is ir Garnett or is it Pevear-Volokhonsky. Do you know the difference? Not being a pud here, you might, I am just wondering. Do you know the difference in how Dostoyevsky is read in general after Mikhail Bahktin? So first of all that classic on your shelf is a copy of a copy of a translation of a copy and provides about as much authenticity as the TSA provides protection from terrorism. If for some reason you have learned 19th century Russian dialect and found an original copy of the dozens of stories of Karamazov (remember, Karamazov was a serial printed in a magazine not a book) in the original Russian and have bound them in a folio and put them on your shelf then great….I mean, doesn’t mean really anything outside of your own tastes but I applaud the coolness of your hobbies. In the meantime you are culture signaling at the expense of money and space which is your right but lets not make it out like you are a repository for the wisdom of the ages.

        3. Centralization of anything normally means making it more prone to catastrophic failure, one only centralizes those systems where the advantages of the approach outweigh its drawbacks…specially if you can only read the copy online and are unable to save it on your HD… Hence the concept of redundancy.
          In reference to culture signalling, I’m surprised that you equate changes over time in language usage (something natural) or differences in translation (yes I read a translation) to outright censorship and the blotting out of inconvenient ideas (which has happened in history and was all the rage in the land of Dostoyevsky for almost a century). It’s like comparing apples and cassava and saying they are the same…
          I think the one who is “culture signalling” is you in this case, as well as tech-signalling without a deeper understanding of the tech…

      2. Meet lolknee, the resident black cloud.
        Hes so intelligent you probably don’t get it.

  35. We’re already seeing the “memory hole” happening now… look at the recent thing with Netflix censoring an old episode of Bill Nye’s show in which he explained how DNA determines one’s sex.

  36. Sometimes things get really disturbing and digital technology certainly has its drawbacks. This article certainly is right because if a book is written on paper it is difficult to change but with the new technology rewriting the written word can be done by just the push of a few buttons and it does not stop at words as pictures can be replaced or retouched just as easily.

  37. Seriously… how many times critical data got lost in a “system update” of some corrupt civil service?
    Electronic systems need to be updated all to often… something might actually go wrong during the update by chance….
    or someone might use the planned update as an opportunity to alter/delete whatever suits him.

    1. The Pentagon manages to “lose” BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in electronic format. More than once.
      Everyone sees this as normal.

  38. I don’t think that there’s anything to worry about here. State sponsored institutions are not the only organizations digitizing great works. Plenty of independent organizations do it too. From here you can draw comparisons between various versions of works.
    Not only that, physical copies can and have been forged, plagiarized and destroyed.
    In any case, the important thing is the survival of ideas not old books. The ideas can be recovered even if the original text cannot. But if it really bothers you, you can always download your favourite text and bind it into a physical copy. Nobody can stop you doing that.

  39. Not just books, but all material media. They could change something on Lexis Nexis or Proquest in an instant, and no one would notice. A movie could be modified, too.

  42. Thats why I never will throw away my natural science books, even if they are availiable as high quality PDF files or if they are older editions. Many of the newer eds. have neglected important aspects (i.e. descriptions ofr experiments or lab apparatuses). Same is valid for my handwritten lecture scripts.

  43. The problem with this argument is the Neoreactionary (NRx) movement, which is almost entirely based on pre-1920’s digitized literature.
    Yes, this will become a point on contention in the future. But only if we are stupid enough to bring this into the culture war. Make no mistake, if we bring Leftist attention to these books, they will fuck us. I suggest dropping the subject.
    Right now, If you want to stop this the best way would be to create an online market dedicated to buying old books after digitization. Make the librarians see some financial advantages to having a guy come by and buy all their old books. But for god’s sake don’t bring ideology into the mix.
    I cannot stress this enough, do not kill this golden goose. Do not make old books political.

  44. Agreed. I find that there is something is very suspicious about digitization of books.
    Also since there is acid in the pages of modern books, how long before they turn to dust?
    We wouldn’t know anything about the Roman Empire if not put down on stone or heavy parchment.

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