A dystopian novel that seems to be predicting the not-so-distant future. An interesting concept with the occassional clunky paragraph and odd turn of phrase. ( )

Reading is good, and ebooks are good for readers. They're smaller, cheaper, conserve natural resources. They're accessible to all. Ereaders make it easier on the eyes and hands. Bad eyesight? Use text-to-speech and other audio devices. Or instantly make any book a large-print version. Ride the bus? Now you have a whole library in your pocket. It's wonderful!

I do believe that, wholeheartedly, and have embraced digital reading, along with millions of other avid readers. I love the digital community, the easy to use devices, and above all, the access. I'm pleased that I've reduced clutter, that (if I maintain my equipment,) I'm leaving less of an environmental footprint. Instead of buying 75,000 pages a year, I'm paying for the ethereal – story in pixel.

Technology has its price. In the real world, we have not only an ongoing fight against net neutrality, and access freedom, but also against censorship. Think it's not happening in the “Land of the Free?” Think again.

“Whitewash washes white not only its target but, over time, any memory of the target. That is the purpose of whitewash.” ~ Ron Powers, CNN Opinion Special, speaking of the sanitizing of Huck Finn.

Boyce Watkins, also a CNN Opinon correspondent, labels it thus: “Making a more appropriate version of Mark Twain's novel available...” He says that NOT editing offensive material is “disconnected from reality.”

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, was quietly censored for over 13 years, and replaced in schools with the mutilated version.

Bradbury's tale has become an iconic tale of censorship, (although he has always maintained that he wrote it to highlight how television destroys our desire for literature.) In 451, it was only after most people stopped reading that the Firemen began to burn the books. In a twist of greatest irony, Ballantine, in 1967, began sanitizing the novel. In all, 75 sections were edited in the school and library version issued by this imprint. Bradbury learned of the “mutilation,” around 1979, and a restored version was released in 1980, and Bradbury issued an incredibly important essay called Coda.

In The Book, we have a society of readers and non-readers, presumably in similar proportions to our current reality, but they read everything on a government edited electronic book. Under the influence of environmental crisis, and a highly effective reduce/reuse/recycle program, books gradually came to be seen as a “wrong” choice, then they became unavailable, and finally illegal even to possess.

The Book showcases some of these concerns, and it does it in a wonderfully well-written, compelling, and believable story of a man who has just discovered how circumscribed his access to thought, controversy, growth and challenge has become. Intention at the highest level has been to make these edits for the greater good. Erase even the memory of conflict, and peace is preserved. It's the uniform presentation of the same interpretations that erases the ideological loggerheads of their past.

Without the print versions to compare, edits, both large and small, became very easy to issue, via daily update transmissions. Digital information being highly mutable, is used to “protect” the citizenry from unpleasantness, maintain political correctness, avoid giving offense, expunge inflammatory ideas, and to eventually bring about peace through uniformity.

It's happening now. Some of the participants at ereading forums refer to printed books as DTBs – short for Dead Tree Book. This is very subtle but it is, nevertheless, shaming language. Printed books are gradually being accepted as wasteful, with digital versions the “environmental” response. And with digital versions, we are faced with a blessing and a curse. Find a typo? Fix it. Terminology becomes offensive? Change it. Maybe we should rename 1984 to 2084? Easy as pie, with just a few keystrokes. Want to add a “stronger female character” to Heinlein's brilliant Puppetmasters? All it takes is a few sentences inserted here and there. Voilá, political correctness. It's good, right?

It's a chilling fiction that is all too real. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.


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I love to read on my Kindle, but also love the feel and smell of real paper books. In The Book, all paper books are banned and it is against the law to be caught with one. People read on The Book which is similar to the Kindle. When I first started reading this book, I thought I would really like it. It was about my favorite topic-books-and it was holding my attention. Then, in about the middle, it got so boring, I quit reading it. I decided I only had so much time alloted to reading, so why read a book I didn't like. But for some unknown reason, after about a week, I decided to try it again. I'm glad I did. While it is not the best book I have ever read, it's a long way from the worst. It does make you think about the future of our world. The characters are very interesting and you feel like you know them personally. They don't do very much and parts of the story that could be very action packed are only lightly touched upon. The ending of the original story was unexpected but good. There is another ending after the addendum that I did not understand at all. While it ties up some lose ends, it ends up adding more. ( )

The Book was extremely thought provoking. This was one of my favorite sections of the book from page 88. It is a conversation that takes place between Winston and Holden.

"Have you ever read a book like this before? From a bound stack of printed paper?"
"No, I haven't."
"Well, enjoy it. The experience is a unique one."

This rings so true to me. I don’t think I could ever enjoy a digital book as much a bound book of pages that I can physically flip through.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Although the ending, well the Addendum ending, confused me. What was so special about Moses? What did I miss there? Message me if you have an idea please! ( )

There are no more books being printed, using paper is outlawed, paper is wasteful in this dystopian novel. Every book was to be recycled, the only way to read a story is on The Book; an E-reader that is controlled by the conglomerate Publishing House. That wasn’t a problem for an everyday guy like Holden Clifford, he liked the stories he read on The Book. In fact he couldn’t wait to get home and clean-up from his job as a pipe fitter, ready to relax and escape into the many novels they offered. His life would have gone on just fine if he hadn’t stumbled upon an incongruity in one of his favorite stories. At a bar called The Library, the original owner had pasted the pages of old books on the walls during the beginning of the Reduce, Reuse and Recycle era. Holden was examining a page of one of his favorite stories, when he noticed that the words were a little different. This discovery starts him asking himself if changing one word could change the meaning, and if one word was changed how much more was changed, and most importantly who was doing the changing? In a future where “big brother is watching you,” asking these types of questions can put you in danger.

Unfortunately I read this on my Kindle which kept me feeling a little bit guilty and tiny bit anxious, and as an author I had questions of my own about the future of publishing. Yikes! Editors are hard enough to work with when you hire them yourself, but what if someone you didn’t know was twisting your words and distorting the meaning of what you wrote? Oh wait that’s the job of the spin doctors on TV news… Seriously, I can see this becoming more of an issue in the coming years. If you are a writer, an editor, a publisher or just someone who likes a good story that makes you think then check out M. Clifford’s The Book. ( )