We here at KindleChat don’t generally like to weigh in on the political dialogue going on in the world today. The reasons for that should be self-evident, I think. The Kindle itself is a politically-neutral device, equally capable of delivering everything from The Communist Manifesto to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. What brings us together is our love of reading and our enthusiasm for Amazon’s e-Reader. For the first time, however, I’ve seen somebody try and make a political commentary on the Kindle, and as a staunch enthusiast myself, I feel compelled to respond.

The Huffington Post recently printed an article by Alan Kaufman, a poet and occasional author, in which he likens “hi-tech” devices like the Amazon Kindle to the technology used by the Nazis to exterminate millions of people in the Holocaust. Let me say that again: he draws parallels between the technology powering a popular e-reader device to the technology used in the murder of six million men, women, and children.

To be honest, I was expecting his article to be a delayed rant about Amazon’s now-infamous removal of 1984 from customers’ Kindles. More than anything I’ve seen or heard since the Kindle first debuted, that was the closest correlation I’ve been able to draw between the Kindle and totalitarianism.

No, instead, Kaufman seems to be of the belief that the Google Books Library Project, along with the proliferation of e-Readers like the Kindle, is somehow destroying the intellectual privacy of the world’s readers. The very fact that companies know which books you are reading constitutes the fulfillment of the Nazi dream, according to Kaufman.

Let me be clear. I very much understand the reticence and sentimentality of those who believe the written world should continue to exist as it has for the past several centuries. I find myself occasionally nostalgic for the tactile feel of books and believe they should still hold a place in our society, and I’m one of those “hi-tech” people Kaufman is talking about in the first place. Unfortunately, that doesn’t lend any credence to his argument.

The truth is that the digitization of books that is occurring as we speak is as far from a totalitarian act as you can get. Where under the Nazis a campaign of book burning all but eliminated hundreds of texts from continental Europe, such an effort would be virtually impossible today. For less than $100, I can purchase an external hard drive that, even though it’s small enough to fit into my laptop bag, could hold over a million books. If you’ve ever had to move a book collection before, you know print isn’t quite so portable.

The transformation of books into a new form is a scary prospect for people not familiar with the technology, but one shouldn’t let that fear cloud their perception of reality. The way things exist today, it’s virtually impossible to totally purge a work of art, however obscure or mundane, from existence. Far from being the first step in a new totalitarian regime, this new era of the written word is the fulfillment of the democratic dream. And for that we should be grateful, not afraid.