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Sarah Palin and e-books
September 3, 2008 | 8:52 am
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By David Rothman
How about this as a Christopher Buckley satire? A moose-hunting soccer mom runs for vice president of the United States. Oh, how I’m tempted for that to be the thrust of my post. Sarah Palin‘s views on a number of topics, from the environment to abortion, are antithetical to mine.
But what about another potential side of Palin, the e-book mom? I don’t know if she reads E. But she does tote a BlackBerry—in fact, two?—for which Mobipocket is an intriguing possibility.
What’s more, Alaska is a vast place where public libraries may be hundreds of miles away from villages. TeleRead and e-books would be naturals in a place like that, just so the censors kept their hands off. Imagine how TeleRead could increase the number of books matching the needs and interests of K-12 students and others.
The Sarah bio and the E angle
Speaking of Palin, I see that a Palin bio is around, although not yet apparently available in an electronic edition. It’s from a small publisher, Epicenter Press, which could benefit from economies that ePub will bring to the e-book industry.
Meanwhile, in PDF, you can read the first chapter of Sarah: How a Small Town Girl Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment on Its Ear. It depicts her younger self as an eager reader—the very kind of child who could have benefited immensely from a well-stocked national digital library system.
Related: In an economic bind, families turn to libraries, an AP story in the Charleston, WVA, newspaper. TeleRead would be one way to help stretch library resources in an era of cutbacks.
Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin,Christopher Buckley
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Comments:
If she had the mental flexibility to be a reader, could she be a Republican?
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
That’s an “interesting” view of readers, Rob….
This is someone who wanted to ban books:
http://tinyurl.com/6ka45h
The more I read about her, the more disgusted I am becoming:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/stop-sarah-palin/
Palin’s opposition to making polar bears an “endangered species” is based on fact. The polar bear population in Alaska and Canada is large and increasing. The polar bear is by no stretch of the imagination endangered. The designation is a ploy to prevent the development of new Alaskan oil fields and thus to keep gas prices high, a goal dear to the heart of all private-jet-owning environmentalists.
You might also want to get some historical perspective on abortion. The issue was so irrelevant in 1960, when birth control was far less effective than today, that it isn’t even mentioned in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book that triggered modern feminism. In fact, the previous wave of feminism, the one that led to votes for women, opposed abortion, regarding it as an evil imposed on women for the convenience of men.
Palin illustrates what feminism should have done instead of supporting legalized abortion. She hasn’t let having a child at 44 stand in the way of being governor of our largest state. She keeps her new baby in a crib in her office and, as someone put it, “discretely” breast feeds the child at meetings. At the same time she’s taken on three of the largest corporations on the planet: Enron, BP and Conoco, refusing to give them a tax rebate in exchange for building a natural gas pipeline to the US. When they threatened not to build the pipeline she held tough and, if you follow the news, you know that they’ve now starting building it without that tax break. Can you think of anything Hillary has done that remotely demonstrates that much toughness? I won’t even mention Obama.
Modern feminism is populated with losers. Rather than free women, they enslaved women to being like men and playing by male rules. Even as an executive, you can’t take your baby into your office, you can only abort that child. And they call that bit of madness “choice.”
To link this to ebooks, you might want to read two ebooks I edited that contain the writings of the most radical of 19th century feminists, Victoria Woodhull. In 1872 she was the first woman to run for President and at times she called for the elimination of marriage. Yet even she opposed abortion, warning of what it meant for children. You can find what she wrote about topics such as sex and marriage in two Adobe PDF titles I released: Lady Eugenist and Free Lover. Unfortunately, because they are facsimiles (so the original texts can be displayed), you can’t display them on many readers. And because they’re Adobe PDFs, Amazon no longer sells them.
–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Spotted on BoingBoing, this librarian.net post quotes from a Time Magazine article about Palin:
Chris, thanks. Not good news. This is exactly one reason I’m so passionate about the need for a strong private sector in e-bookdom, as well as user-driven projects like Gutenberg. I love libraries, but by themselves, they aren’t enough to guarantee access to books that PO the pols. The operative word here is “bypass.” David
Yeah, we all know the sort of “librarian” Palin was fighting, the sort that wants young girls to read sexual trash while being indifferent to genuine censorship. Google and you’ll discover that the American Library Association has refused to condemn the imprisonment of librarians in the Cuban dictatorship. Here’s what civil libertarian Nat Hentoff had to say about that:
“The American Library Association — the largest organization of librarians in the world — continually declares that it fights for everyone’s “Freedom to Read!” and its Library Bill of Rights requires its members to “challenge censorship.” Yet the leadership of the ALA — not the rank and file — insistently refuses to call for the immediate release of the independent librarians in Cuba — designated as “prisoners of conscience” by Amnesty International. They are serving very long prison terms because they do believe in the freedom to read — especially in a dictatorship.”
Censorship applied to children is an issue on which almost everyone is actually agreed. Parents are almost universal in their insistence that they be able to control what their children see, hear and read. Mothers like Palin want their children protected from foul language and sexual trash. Liberals want their children protected from anything that challenges their faith in the Infallible One. (No, not Obama, the other one, Charles Darwin.)
The latter is especially silly. It’s impossible to properly teach what Darwin wrote without explaining the context in which he wrote and the ideas with which he was disagreeing, particularly William Paley’s Natural Theology, a book Darwin praised in his autobiography. The latter is a romanticized form of Intelligent Design.
Palin is marvelous. She has made a boring presidential race utterly fascinating. Forget Biden and McCain. What we need is a debate between her and Obama that touches on bedrock social issues.
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle