[renegadedev]

Burning a book (good or bad) is the lowest form of expression humans can stoop to. If people understood the fact that a book is simply a personification of ideas, and ideas good or bad, cannot perish in a fire, the will realize the folly of engaging in a futile act like burning a book.

One of the inevitable consequences of the digital revolution will be that, there will come a time, when a controversial book will be published exclusively in digital format with no physical copies to burn. I don't know if this necessarily good or bad, but the fact that idiots can't burn a book will provide me some amount of pleasure.

[forgotAgain]

Only two differences with digital books come immediately to mind.

1) There won't be any smoke. At least now we can see the act and know of it. It will be much more invisible when someone can just enter a phrase into a lookup table that ultimately filters packets.

2) Not only will the book be censored but any discussion of the book being censored will be censored. Invisibly.

[WiseWeasel]

I'm not so sure that this type of book-burning is tied to the physicality of books, rather than a symbol of rejection. Certainly, there have been instances throughout history, such as when the Nazi government or the Catholic Church have carried out organized purges of particular written works on a societal level, where the supply of the work has been materially impacted to the point that it is difficult to obtain.

But I assume you're referring more to examples such as this story, of small groups using book-burning as a publicity stunt, or a public symbol of their rejection of the work. In those cases, I doubt the lack of physicality makes any difference; if they wanted to protest a digital-only book, they'd simply print it out on something flammable first.

[renegadedev]

Good point. I was not necessarily referring to the physicality of books but the notion these book-burners subscribe to, that if they symbolically burn a book, the idea will perish. Your point of the Nazis burning the books out of supply only illustrates the point that to burn a book in the hope that the idea will perish, did not necessarily work.

[michaelbuckbee]

I can imagine the SAAS site for this now: "BurnABook.com".

1. Enter a Book Title

2. Pull text of first chapter from Amazon

3. Animate flames around the words burning.

4. Provide FB and Twitter links to share your burned book.

[LesZedCB]

I'm sorry, I just had to share this: http://xkcd.com/750/

[unimpressive]

>but the fact that idiots can't burn a book will provide me some amount of pleasure.

"There's more than one way to burn a book." - Kurt Vonnegut.

While it may no longer be possible to literally burn a book in that scenario, censorship is alive and well on the web.