GREAT news for the First Amendment!

Huffington Post seems to have a vested interest in killing off print before its time. Maybe they are right, but they certainly are overzealous about it.

"But if Amazon tries to enforce its demands by removing "buy" buttons from some pages again, some believe it could harm its reputation in the eyes of customers and the publishing industry." You THINK???? Unfortunately, as long as they keep free shipping, most people probably won't care. I see this as a really serious industry issue.

OUCH! OUCH! and TRIPLE OUCH! If you need another reason to boycott Amazon.com....

this bothers me based on all of the political propoganda that masquerades as literature lately. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck both attempt to use best-seller lists as a public bellweather of their popularity, but both give away electronic editions of their books to boost their standings. When does literature cross the line into propoganda?

I was reading about the small window that opened the other day in the "Great Firewall of China" and then read this article. It bothers me that so many people seem to be ready to send printing presses to a junkyard and rely entirely on electronic distribution of information. First, there is still a HUGE demographic who does not have regular access to the internet. Secondly, what would happen if all of our information could be controlled with a filtering program? And finally, printed material still gets into places that a computer cannot. I read an opinion piece in the NYT before Christmas that discussed how an Afghanistan woman learned to read with the help of her young daughter and the newspaper pieces that wrapped her fish. Are we turning information into something elitist? Is there a parallel between a push to make everything electronic - so only people with Kindles and laptops can get information, and a time not-so-long-ago when literacy was a class distinction? DO WE REALLY WANT TO CREATE A NEW CLASS DISTINCTION BY RESTRICTING INFORMATION TO ONLY THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD ACCESS TO IT?

The good news is that publishing, as you and I have come to love it for the last couple of decades, is not dying. The bad news is that it's dead.

Although this NYT opinion piece deals with more than just judicial censhorship, it give a very apocolyptic view of the influence of courts on higher education in several categories that I find very frightening in the same way that the fact that one judge was able to censor a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" without any academic review or input was bone-chilling to me.

This upsets me so much.