Fahrenheit 451 published as Bradbury finally succumbs to ebooks Legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury has overcome his objections to ebooks and will start releasing some of his works in electronic form. The first book to be published is his seminal classic “Fahrenheit 451,” the 1953 tale of a dystopian future world where books are burned on sight and a literary underground fights …
You don't even have to. You just revoke people's DRM keys.
Or better yet, why burn at all? Just silently replace the words in the book with more politically correct ones.
You could gradually rewrite all the classics to support your particular government.
"We have always been at war with Eurasia, see it says so right here on my nook!"
If we should have learned one thing about the Internet over the last few years it is that you CANNOT remove the original from the Internet. Once some, text, a picture, a video, whatever has been circulated then it will forever be residing somewhere.
Ironic that the Internet and ebooks could be the very thing that ensures the "written" word lasts forever. Books may not be burned, but they to disintegrate over time. Digital media can be similarly corrupt, but ensuring the integrity is a lot easier and cheaper.
"If we should have learned one thing about the Internet over the last few years it is that you CANNOT remove the original from the Internet."
"They" don't know that and will never bother to compare version A with version B. And when in the brave new future all that Joe Average will own will be a locked down tablet, the internet will be just whatever they get dished up to their increasingly locked-down and walled-garden device.
but then I'm a hardliner on that. SF is about improbable but possible, Fantasy is about the impossible but rational-sounding*. So when writing Fantasy you get to break the rules at the start of the adventure, but once you've replaced the bit of physics you don't like with something you do, you have to strictly follow the new rules. Bradbury isn't very good at that, he sort of breaks them at will.
*I think it was Sam Moskowitz who first wrote this distinction in one of his histories of SF, but I don't recall the precise wording or which book it was, although probably Explorers of the Infinite.
Bradbury's old skool style needs to be read from a dusty old paperback with the cover half hanging off for the full experience.
Don't get me wrong, my battered PRS-600 does me sterling service, but just as some artists seem to sound better on vinyl I think Ray Bradbury reads better on paper.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
