“My father and his two brothers and his sister grew up in the 1920s with no money but with plenty of books. Almost no one in Natchez had any wealth to speak of, and therefore it was culture that delineated your place in society–culture along with intelligence, ambition, looks, manners, and family history.” – Robb Forman Dew in a guest essay for Maud Newton.
The TeleRead take: In terms of money, most of the Third World is like the American South of yore–in fact, more so. Will elites in India, China and elsewhere feel a little threatened if e-books allow the unwashed to narrow the culture gap? Fascinatingly, it’s the best books, the classics, that will be free in developing countries through such projects as the Internet Archive and MIT’s $100 laptop initiative. Let’s hope, by the way, that plenty of local equivalents will spring up to augment the international literary archives.
