Will Ebooks End Book Burnings?

In this article about all the controversy surrounding International Burn a Koran Day, it's pointed out that you can't burn ebooks.


I suppose that technically you could douse a Kindle or iPad with accelerant and light it off. However, the act seems like something less than the grand symbolic gesture of building a huge flaming bonfire of books.

It also fails to destroy the ebook itself, since we're talking about a book made of electrons. You don't destroy the content by destroying the device that reads it.

Which raises the much more problematic scenario of simply wiping the book out of existence with the click of a mouse. Think back to the time when Amazon took people's ebook downloads of (ironically) 1984 away -- just like that.

Might not be as symbolic, but it's way more frightening, in my opinion.