Do Luddies Read?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Do Luddites Read?

If in the past a tyrant wanted to eliminate a book not acceptable to his ego or his ideology he had to go to a great deal of bother to discredit books and their writers. Seizing and burning books meant organizing government or military departments to search out copies, although many university students were (and still are) eager to volunteer in ideological censorship.

With gadgetry our culture has progressed from burning books (which, after all, pollutes the air) to deleting books from the disinformation superhighway by clicking an app.

One of the early sellers of electronic books discovered that it was selling a book without the permission of the copyright owner. The book was not only withdrawn from sale, but all the copies already sold were made to disappear instantly from the little plastic boxes of all the people who had bought the book. The purchasers were given credit, and all was well except for this disturbing reality: any book, or even all of them, can be made to disappear from any electronic reader at any time.

Books on any sort of electronic device can be altered or deleted by someone else upon command. The book you begin to read can be changed before you finish it. Any titles you read can of course be monitored by anyone who is interested in knowing what you are up to.

And this is nothing new, except for improved efficiency in shoving unacceptable words down the Orwellian memory hole. In church, for example, some familiar hymns have been altered for contemporary sensitivities. Church committees and publishers have sometimes determined that our ancestors were wrong, and have then changed or eliminated words, phrases, and entire songs very dear to generations of worshippers.

Destroying art is an ISIS / Taliban thing, not our thing, even when prefaced with “as arranged by…”

However, the words in the printed hymnal do not change while you are holding the hymnal. Any printed book in your hands can be determined by you to be a bad book or a good book. But nothing about that physical book is going to change except for the inevitable decay of physical matter through fire, immersion in water, or the passage of years. The contents of an electronic edition, however, could be whatever the publisher or service provider wants them to be at any moment.

Resistance both to snooping and to changing words and songs and texts is not a matter of being a Luddite, but a reasonable desire that the editors and purveyors of those words and songs and texts remember that they are not Shakespeare, John Newton, or Lord Byron. Ms. Grundy and her doppelganger Josef Goebbels don’t rate a veto on art, music, and faith.

An electronic book is even more ephemeral than Radio Shack™. There is much to be said for – and by – that printed book on the shelf.

And, hey, Luddites – happy bicentennial!


Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987.

Finn, Peter, and Petra Couvee’. The Zhivago Affair. New York: Pantheon Books. 2014.

Manning, Molly Guptill. When Books Went to War. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pubishing Company. 2014.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1960.

Slonim, Mark. Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1967. New York: Oxford University Press. 1967.

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