7 ms·
> As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than befo
by Koliakis 6y ago
> As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material.
I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical. I do think there's some level of censorship happening here and I get inklings of book burning when I consider how difficult it is to get these books.
- whydoibother 6y agoPeople are buying them to resell to all the chuds. It’s not some grand plot.
- mcshicks 6y agoDid you try archive.org? I was curious what the concern was with some titles and was able to find a couple there.
- wincy 6y agoA few days ago they were one of the top torrents on a high seas themed site. I archived them if for no other reason than because I’ve been told that I shouldn’t.
- gregallan 6y agoNobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children. I’m personally glad that you’ve helped preserve these once-beloved cultural artifacts. However, I’d hope that anyone would hesitate to give these particular books to children in 2021.
- AlexandrB 6y agoIt would be one thing if the publisher just stopped printing them. As pointed out in the article they were banned from eBay (a dubious honour achieved not even by Mein Kampf), and removed from libraries. In terms of giving these to children - I'd argue that this is the parent's decision to make and that there are far worse things we are seem to be ok exposing children to, like advertising or social media.
- pseudalopex 6y agoeBay only allows annotated versions of Mein Kampf.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago>Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. while technically true this is also essentially wrong, if someone stops selling something for moral reasons then they are strongly implying you are immoral for acquiring the thing they have stopped selling; and it is a necessary component of the immoral that one should not have the immoral, transmit the immoral, commit the immoral or otherwise partake of the immoral.
- MikeUt 6y ago> Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children. Unless they donated the book rights to the public domain, they literally are telling you exactly that.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago| if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors, so the prices for collectibles are high. That's not unusual. What are you proposing be done? Force the Seuss Foundation to publish books it doesn't want to publish?
- christkv 6y agoI would prefer that any book that has not been in print for 10 years automatically fall into public domain as abandoned.
- acdha 6y agoYou’d need some rule voiding publication contracts and reverting rights to the author - otherwise unethical publishers might try to game the system to get works into the public domain to avoid royalties if something seems likely to be rediscovered due to a tie-in or another work by that author becoming popular.
- cameldrv 6y agoThe Seuss foundation is free to stop publishing the books. I don’t see how that creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to prohibit sale, nor for any library that was happily lending these last week to pull them from circulation entirely. After all of this, it is considerably easier to procure the writings of Adolf Hitler than of Dr. Seuss. That is very strange and wrong.
- acdha 6y agoDid anyone say it creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to ban them? Those companies chose to do so voluntarily under their existing policies, which used to be a thing conservatives supported. The Mein Kampf comparisons also tend to leave out two key factors: most of Dr. Seuss’ books are intended for children and they’re presented without critical analysis. I don’t think you’d find much objection to the same kind of scholarly work discussing Seuss’ works in the historical context – Dr. Seuss Goes to War being a good example of what that might look like.
- nineplay 6y agoI've been trying to get a Hugo award winner and the paperback was selling for $400. Sometimes old books are just hard to find. Dr Seuss wrote 60 books, its no surprise that not all are currently publish. You'll find this is also true of Isaac Asimov