What does it mean to burn a book on the Internet? Couldn't help but post what should be a headline to Business 2.0.

The other day, I was asking my friend what he was doing. He replied "Oh nothing, I'm just burning some books"

He had downloaded some books on tape, and was burning them onto CD's so he could listen to them in his car.

Unfortunatley when I first heard it, book burning still carries with it other associations. Censorship, Fahrenheit 451. I guess it's kind of fitting that I got the NY times delivered to my hotel room in China. Things really are opening up here. Maybe a little too much EM-Forrester "The Machine Stops"

Surprisingly despite the heat, and everything else, Shanghai is not all that Blade Runnerish...

Amazon.com

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.

Reviewer: A reader from Napoleon, MI
The novel Fahrenheit 451 tells us about a time in the future in which books are illegal to read or posses, and firemen aren't employed to save houses (because they are virtually fire resistant), but to burn books. Guy Montag, a fireman, and the story's main character, enjoys the destruction and burning of the books and he is constantly soaked in the smell of kerosene. Montag had a weird feeling about things, but wasn't quite sure what it was. He was like all the other people, in that he would just keep going ahead to where he was going, not looking at what he was walking past or paying much attention to things. Except one night he stopped and met a girl who told him of the past where people were allowed to think, to read, and to have original ideas for themselves, and the ability to write them down and share them with others.

As the story goes on, it deals with his drug-abusing wife and her weird friends. Also there are crews of people that are out to save people that try to committee suicide due to the high suicide rate. The reader discovers the ways that the society works, about how people are not unique, not knowing their own neighbors, and how the television thinks for everyone so that they don't have to.

This book shows a future where it is nearly impossible to be a freethinking individual. Ray Bradbury's descriptive writing makes the story easy to read and hard to put down. The story thickens, twists, and curves with every page as Montag is forced to go on the run from a mechanical hound whose only mission is to destroy Montag. It is a book that everyone should try to read. It really makes the reader think about how our future may turn out like this someday.