Rafa - Book burning

Is book burning the answer?
by Keith Redfern

If book burning is the answer, what on earth is the question?

The burning of books has strong overtones of Nazi intolerance in pre-war Germany. Destroying what is not acceptable by the powers that be, as if that ever made any difference.

It is incredibly naive to consider that burning someone's book will have any effect at all on the message the book might contain. If anything it is more likely to engender curiosity, like banning something. Yet there have been many occasions on which books have been burned by oppressive regimes.

Perhaps this topic is aimed at the decrease in book reading by a public which increasingly wishes to obtain information from the internet, or listen to spoken books while driving. In this case it is useful to recall that current trends are not always continued into the foreseeable future.

When televisions first became a common feature of every living room, the film industry sensed a falling off of audiences and this was certainly the case in the short term. But as time went on cinema audiences began to return and new and bigger cinemas were required to replace those which had been closed and demolished by those believing the movie industry was becoming a thing of the past.

The same could be said of books. It may be that in some countries book sales are decreasing at the moment, but that does not mean they will continue to fall. Furthermore, in some countries, like France for example, book sales are healthy and there is no perceived problem at all.

If there is a large number of unsellable books in some parts of the world, it is to be hoped that publishers and book sellers will think hard before they take action. It could well be that the books will become sellable in the future. Perhaps book sellers should scale down their orders in the immediate future as a precautionary measure.

As far as the publishers are concerned, modern methods of book production, as practised by E-publishers for example, mean that long print runs can be a thing of the past and that books can be printed as and when required. The advantage is obvious. Publishers do not print more books than are needed, book stores do not stock more books than they can sell, and yet whenever someone wishes to purchase a copy of a book, it can be printed and made available in days.

There is always more than one way to solve a problem. Those of my generation were brought up to believe that books are special, and the amount of tremendous pleasure given by books over the years, and which continues to be given despite the hours spent online each day, suggests that burning books is a terrible thing to do.
Burning something means it can never be recovered. Store it, box it, shelve it, keep it in any way you want. But for goodness sake don't burn books, whatever the reason might be.

http://www.helium.com/items/1660401-burning-books-publishers-book-stores