Fahrenheit 416

    Ray Bradbury, author of many well loved and prophetic novels, has long had nothing but contempt for technological developments in media.  he hates the Internet, saying, "There's nothing there!" and has resisted the development of ebooks passionately.  He feels both along with television and no doubt any number of other recent inventions are taking people away from such worthwhile pursuits as reading.
     Ironically, he has h ad to bow to the inevitable.  His book Fahrenheit 451is being released by his publisher as an ebook.  I say ironically because this very fact means that in spite of his prediction, people are reading.
     I have my own perspective on this, as my regular readers (of electronic text) know. 
As a voracious reader who happens to be blind, I have long been stuck with reading what the National Library Services www.loc.gov/nls make available, certainly wonderful but slim pickin's and slow and resource intensive. Thanks to ebooks I can read and read and read. I am myself a novelist, had twice as many credits as I need for my degree in English, and have quite narrow tastes in reading, utterly unserved by NLS. So needless to say when I heard of Bradbury's attitude, it really pissed me off. I know a lot of people who confuse technology with some of its less ideal examples. Ebooks are not television or video games or Facebook. They are what any book was to start with, the product of a mind and imagination. Mr. Bradbury ought to recall that his books, each and every one of them, started out as thought.  (I recall gazing at Candace Robb's head at a Historical Novel Society conference and thinking, "My God, that's where Owen Archer was born.")
     As I tell my friends who insist that only print on paper books are really reading, just as soon as print on paper books start reading themselves aloud to me, I'm there.
     By the way, 416 degrees F is the temperature at which a Kindle or other ereader will catch fire, according to a web site that apparently has something there.

Fahrenheit 451 Kindle Edition