William F. Buckley, Jr., dead at 82, was early TeleRead booster
William F. Buckley, Jr., my political opposite but a gung-ho booster of e-books and the TeleRead proposal, calling for a well-stocked national digital library system, blended in with local libraries and schools, is dead at the age of 82. RIP, Bill. From a USA Today blog:
“National Review Online, an outgrowth of the magazine Buckley founded, describes his death at The Corner: I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died overnight in his study in Stamford, Connecticut. After year of illness, he died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.”
Even while fighting his wars, however, WFB had his share of liberal friends, among them John Kenneth Galbraith, and he could be surprisingly open-minded on matters ranging from marijuana use to, yes, TeleRead, about which he said:
“Andrew Carnegie, if he were alive, would probably buy TeleRead from Mr. Rothman for $1, develop the whole idea at his own expense, and then make a gift of it to the American people.”
“Bracing idea”
WFB was talking up TeleRead as early as the the 1990s, recommending it in a syndicated column to presidential candidates.
In another column, written in 1993, he said, “It is a bracing idea, the notion that a student can go to the public library and read via TeleRead any book he wished to read, or any magazine. That a few years down the line the young people would have TeleRead computers of their own, even as everyone now has a television set.”
Gates as Carnegie?
Bill Gates, alas, though often likened to Carnegie, has yet to act. And if he did, I’d worry about the use of proprietary formats and other gotchas. May he someday prove my concerns wrong!
I myself an open to a variety of business models, but would favor a mix of public and private approaches. That’s the best way to encourage widespread access to e-books, full diversity of content, intellectual freedom and fair compensation for writers and publishers, for whom TeleRead mustn’t be the only alternative. TeleRead calls not just for online libraries but also full and systematic integration of them with Real World schools and libraries. Yes, that means close attention to issues such as hardware and proper preparation of teachers and libraries. You can read an early version of the TeleRead idea—it’s evolved over the years—in the last chapter of Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier.
Meanwhile Wikipedia, which many would consider an e-book, has already updated its Buckley entry—one more vindication of Bill’s belief in the technology.
Technorati Tags: William F. Buckley,Buckley,WFB,National Review
February 28th, 2008 at 1:39 am
I didn’t know WFB was such a champion of electronic literature. It’s nice to know. I’m a fan of Buckley, as you might have surmised from the content of my pervious comments on this site. As a libertarian I don’t agree with everything he espoused, but he did a great deal to promote free-market economics. He will certainly be missed. As a side note, I’m also a big fan of WFB’s son, Christopher Buckley, and I highly recommend his books, some of which are available as ebooks. Talented family.