Thursday, October 3, 2019

War on books

In The New York Times Duncan White writes about a global war on books:

Around the world, many authoritarian regimes — having largely corralled the internet — now have declared war on the written world, their oldest enemy. The received wisdom after the close of the Cold War was that physical books were outdated, soon to be swept aside in the digital age; and that the internet was instead the real threat to governments seeking to repress provocative thinking. A generation later, the opposite may be true.
Notice that while our own authoritarian-in-chief rails against “the media,” book publishers, like books themselves, or at least books not about him, are pretty much off his radar — at least so far.

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