I don’t know, man. Adding critical commentary to Mein Kampf? It’s pretty full of critical commentary already if you ask me.
And as a schoolbook? Not good. With kids the way they are these days, if you have to start including commentaries in the text of Mein Kampf to debunk Hitler’s “arguments,” you’re only going to give them ideas.
“Das Ziel ist die Entmystifizierung des Buches.”
That’s right. E-books only account for 1 percent of all book sales in Germany.
Why is this? Let us count the ways…
Germans believe they cannot read as well on digital reading devices. This is because they have never held a digital reading device in their hands, much less tried to read from one, but still.
Germans are convinced that they are “better” at reading from paper (I don’t make this stuff up, people).
Like savages who believe that a camera captures your soul, Germans believe that an e-book reader captures the souls of the books it, uh, holds captive (OK, that part I did make up).
But the biggest reason of all Germans don’t like e-books and e-book readers is that Germans don’t like technology. Technology that isn’t German, I mean.
“In Germany we’re still at 1 percent, but that’s already an increase of 77 percent from the previous year.”
PS: Of course low e-book sales in Germany might also have to do with the fact that German book prices are set by the German culture mafia (by the publishers!? = you pay the same artificially high price everywhere) so they get to set the e-book prices, too (you can pay up to $25 for one). And although printed books are exempt from Germany’s 19 percent value added tax, e-books aren’t. Not that the system is rigged or anything. I’m just saying.
Completely clueless as to what happened in Germany and environs during what appears to have been a rather turbulant period roughly between 1939 and 1945, a young German historian has written a book in which he asks his readers to ask their grandparents if they might possibly know.
“Whatever it was, it must have been a pretty big deal,” the historian said. “And as my studies now indicate, immediately after this whatever it was event, conversations about it between parents and children appear to have been nearly impossible as it was, well, hell if I know. That’s part of the mystery. And that’s why I’ve written this book.”
Time is running out. The answer to how a cultured, civilized nation did something “I dunno” (text slightly altered here) lies in the minds of the dying generation that took part, many of whom are ready and willing to talk at the end of their lives.
Not in Germany it ain’t. No way. It’s, uh, I dunno. It’s just plain wrong. It’s too American or something.
Let Amazon & Co. sell all the damned ebooks they want to over yonder (currently 105 ebooks for every 100 printed at Amazon), we’re sticking to tradition and our traditional fixed book prices (this protects our culture somehow) and the unfair taxation and the measly 0.5 percent ebook sales of total volume of books sold in Germany (sure we only got around to introducing the Kindle here just a few weeks back, but still).
Remember this: Germans don’t read ebooks.
And remember this too: Television had no future (radio pioneer Mary Somerville) and the world only needed five computers at most (IBM president Thomas J. Watson).
Verlage und Buchhandlungen in Deutschland sind zögerlich, weil die Investitionen hoch und die Gewinnspannen niedrig sind und es außerdem mal wieder Streit um die Mehrwertsteuer gibt: Während gedruckte Bücher einem ermäßigten Satz von sieben Prozent unterliegen, sind es für E-Books 19. Und bis das ausdiskutiert ist, wird vermutlich auch Amazon.de mehr E-Books als Bücher verkaufen. Denn in Deutschland wurde der Kindle ja erst vor vier Wochen eingeführt.
Despite the, well, you know. Hey, plagiarism was gestern (yesterday). Today they call it mixing.
The publication last month of her novel about a 16-year-old exploring Berlin’s drug and club scene after the death of her mother, called “Axolotl Roadkill,” was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author. The book shot to No. 5 this week on the magazine Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list.
Observing Hermann 