Phil Ochs Time

As I read the latest news from the state of Mississippi, which once again has taken the lead in raw, unbridled, smug, self-satisfied hatred, I felt increasingly angry. And then, as I sometimes do, I went beyond my anger, beyond my frustration: I decided it was Phil Ochs time.

And it almost always is. It's no coincidence that Billy Bragg found evoked him with "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night"-- for indeed, he's still "as 'live as you or me" -- in fact, he's more alive now than he ever has been. Phil always claimed to just grab his songs from the headlines -- as witness, the wry title of his first LP,  All the News that's Fit to Sing -- but there was a whole lot more to them than that. Phil was a sort of tuning fork for his times, but in being that, he was tuned right in to many of the timeless foibles every era shares.

Many hailed (or dismissed) Phil as a mere "protest" singer -- a label I'm sure he wouldn't have minded -- but there was so much more to him than that. He could write the greatest anti-war ballad ever penned ("I Ain't Marching Anymore"), and at the same moment depict the common sailor in a way any Navy veteran couldn't help but admire ("The Men Behind the Guns"). At a moment when many hardcore lefties were dismissing JFK as a sellout, Phil wrote an elegy for the slain president that stands with Whitman's among the finest ever written -- and yet, his acerbic tirades against American interventionism never lost their edge, as in "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo" or "Cops of the World." And he always had a crazy sense of ironic humor (on both sides), which bubbled up in songs such "Draft Dodger Rag" and "Love Me, I'm A Liberal."

Another side of Phil was that he dug deep in the annals of American poetry, and had an uncanny knack for setting poems to music. His version of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" rescues that poem from what, in mere printed words, might seem maudlin, crafting it into a ballad that can bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened anti-romantic. But still better is his setting of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells," which transmogrifies a tuneful poem into a poetic tune, complete with guitar harmonics for the bells themselves -- it's a masterpiece.

It's often said that Phil felt despair, and lost his way, later in his career. Fear he surely felt, but his way was always sure; in his late musings such as "The Flower Lady" and "Pleasures of the Harbor," he reached a lyric height far beyond the common songwriter's scope, and with "Crucifixion" he revisited the Kennedy assassination with an apocalyptic overlay of epic proportions. Many of these songs are the equal -- some might say, the better -- of Dylan's anthems of the time. Phil and Bob were, indeed, always linked together; it was Phil that brought Bob out of motorcycle-accident retirement to Madison Square Garden's Evening with Salvador Allende. And, back in the day, it was to Phil's apartment that Bob went to share "Mr. Tambourine Man" for the first time.

Phils Ochs took his own life forty years ago in Far Rockaway, New York. Och's biographer, Marc Eliot, wrote about how personally that loss was felt, He predicted that, when Dylan dies, his death -- though greater in some wider sense -- would never be felt as personally as was Phil's.

And I agree.

Debt

West Germany signs up for its 50% debt reduction in 1953

What, exactly, is debt? The question takes on new urgency as, yet again, the economic wise men of the European Union declare that Greece must submit to their terms -- for, after all, is there not a great debt at stake? Not to address it in the EU's terms, clearly, would be irresponsible and disastrous -- and so, their ministers speak to Greece -- the cradle of the civilization they claim to represent -- as one would to a child.

The Greek government has debts, indeed, and Greek banks have still more. But what does this really mean? Nietzsche was hardly the first to notice that the German word for guilt (schuld) derives from the older concept of debt (schulden). In English texts, "forgive us our debts" was an older and more common form of the Lord's Prayer's "forgive us our trespasses." Debt is sin, Christ is our "redeemer," and entrance into the kingdom of heaven is to be -- in these terms -- a forgiveness of debts.

We in the U.S. like to pillory the profligate -- it's almost a national passion. Republicans in the US Congress took the lead in making personal bankruptcy more onerous, and have harped, from the Reagan era to our own, on the evil of deficits, and the need to cover any expense with a parallel cut. It's become almost a mantra with the Tea Party set.

But there's a problem here. For one, the debt of nations is not at all like the debt of people. Ordinary people can't print their own currency, or re-value it, or issue bonds to fund their new chimney. Nations can do this, because they have the larger essential reserves -- a labor force, roads, cities, minerals and other natural resources to generate future wealth, and that creates the ability to evaluate their worth, and trade in it.  But even more than this, the debt of nations is not guilt, nor is their spending like the profligacy of private persons.

Greece has suffered. It has suffered for its overspending (which, as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has pointed out, was no so much more horrific than that of many other nations), for its failure to live up to the expectations of the creditors who loaned it and its banks generous funds during what seemed to be boom times. The EU forces have imposed austerity to an amazing extent -- cuts in pensions, tax increases, cuts in social services, privatization of national treasures -- its entire economy has shrunk by more than a quarter. If Greece today is less well-prepared to pay back its debts -- or rather, the debts of its banks -- than it was several years ago, it's largely because it's taken the EU prescription of austerity.

And what is "austerity"? Very clearly, it is a special sort of punishment, one reserved to errant nations. They must be made to pay! Even if every last citizen is to starve, even if the cure kills the patient, pay they must. The latest statements from the German finance minister make it quite clear that the goal of the latest agreement, is not to make it more likely to recoup Greek debt -- rather, it is to punish the Greeks.

One should see at a glance how much this sort of "debt" is like "guilt." But there's one way in which "debt" is different, when it's money that's at stake: those who loan money expect a profit from it. They don't lend out of kindness, nor was the debt incurred out of errant sins. They gave because they expected to receive, and then some.

But let's not focus on Greece -- let's look at Ireland, a country which willingly accepted the EU's austerity prescriptions. Now, seven years later, we are told that there are "signs of recovery" -- signs evident to economists, its seems, but hard for the ordinary Irish citizen to see. Any number of years is too much to endure such pain, the more so when all it really does is satisfy the creditors (who, one might imagine, might prefer to be satisfied sooner -- but not, it seems, as much as they prefer the glee of punishing another).

And seven years, interestingly, the the time laid out for Sh'mittah -- the traditional forgiveness of debts in the Jewish Torah. In that year, debts are to be forgiven, and the poor welcomed to glean in the fields. Seems to me it's time.

Blurred Lines

Blurred lines, indeed. The jury verdict of 7.4 million dollars against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke offers yet another example of how juries -- that is to say, how most people -- misunderstand originality in music. Because, in fact, music is by its very nature unoriginal -- every melody line, every hook, every grace note is but a variation on a number of ancient themes, progressions, and melodies. And in fact, that's why we like music -- precisely because it feels both new and familiar. As former Vandals drummer and present-day entertainment lawyer Joe Escalante remarked to the LA Times, it's a dark day for creativity, and in the end, this will be a net loss for music fans" -- but "good news for lawyers and the bitter everywhere."

There are, contrary to popular belief, only a limited number of musical possibilities out there. Nearly all pop music is in 4/4 time, and relies upon a number of common 'progressions' -- chord sequences -- I/V/vi/IV, I/V/vi/iii (the "Pachebel's Canon/Lighter Shade of Pale progression), vi/V/IV/V, and so on. There are a few less common ones, and of course jazz and other genres use a wider variety of them than popular music (though, it's been argued, all jazz essentially derives from the basic blues pattern). Within these, there' a restricted number of possible melodies -- many, but far from infinite -- and, like some robot throwing vast amounts of spaghetti against the fridge to see if it sticks, songwriters and composers have tried out them all. Some, it seems, are stickier than others -- and stickiness is what listeners want, after all -- so they are turned to repeatedly.

So of course we've been here before. And before. And before. Perhaps the most egregious example until now was the case of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" vs. the Chiffons "He's So Fine" -- or, as it's officially known, "Bright Tunes Music vs. Harrisongs Music" -- details at USC's fabulous Music Copyright Infringement Resource). In that case, it came down to a few of what were called 'grace notes'(actually appoggiatura), which suggested the possibility of what the judge called 'unconscious  borrowing.' The damages awarded for this were spectacular: 1.6 million dollars -- 6.5 million in today's currency, nearly as much as the Gaye case.

Such an award is justified by its champions as discouraging 'illegal' infringements, but in fact it does no such thing. If they had lawyers enough, there are tens of thousands of songs whose authorship could be litigated in this way -- and almost any new pop song you can imagine would be a fresh candidate. Instead, it will stifle creativity -- Harrison himself admitted he was 'too paranoid' to write any new material for years after the lawsuit --by preventing the natural and inexorable process of fusing the old and the new that's what Joni Mitchell called 'the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.'

Part of the problem is the way music copyright is handled. The songwriter rights, also known as publishing rights, date back to the era when sheet music sales were a key source of revenue. That's not true today, but these underlying rights still apply, since any recording of them -- including the 'original' one -- relies on a license to to 'use' them. It's why, when "My Sweet Lord" was in dispute, the parties weren't Harrison himself or the Chiffons, but Harrisongs and Bright Tunes, the music's publishers. And, when boiled down to sheet music, songs look a lot more similar than they in fact are -- since part of what makes a song a hit is the arrangement and performance of a particular version. Ins some cases, a cover version does better than the original -- Richie Havens's "Here Comes the Sun," for instance, was a bigger hit on the charts than Harrison's own version -- but in that case, the 'publisher' portion of the royalties went to Harrison anyway -- as would be the case with any covers.

But the problem is, almost all music is a 'cover' of something. Boiled down to sheet music, the similarities are greater than the differences -- but in this modern era, when sheet music isn't even printed in most cases, this hardly seems the point.

What we need, I'd argue, is the throw out the entire existing copyright system for music. Get rid of the 'sandwich' -- publishing rights/performance rights/broadcast rights/non-earthbound communication rights -- and replace it with a system in which 10% of all royalties for all new songs are placed in a fund available to those who can make a case for similarity to older ones; damages should be capped. Then, pay a fixed portion for any performance or rebroadcast, accounting for the (divided) writing royalties. This may sound complex, but in fact, it's been tacitly done within the industry for decades -- which is why cases such as the Gaye/Williams/Thicke one are rare. Let's 'fess up, folks -- when it comes to pop music, there really isn't anything new under the sun.

New Ideas about Policing -- from 1829

The very idea of a "police force" in the modern sense was in every way a Victorian invention. In London in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, crime was fought by an unwieldy array of forces: parish officers (beadles), private night watchmen, and the infamous "Bow Street Runners," whose principal job was apprehending persons wanted on charges to ensure their appearance in court, but who did little or nothing of what we'd conceive of as "patrolling."

The force behind this force was British PM Sir Robert Peel, whose name gave us two popular early nicknames for officers of the police he established ("Bobbies" and "Peelers"). In 1829, in the Police Act, he set forth a clear set of guidelines for these officers, which became known as Peel's Principles. Peel realized that, absent the public's trust and co-operation, the very idea of a police force was doomed to failure.

The police -- in London and elsewhere -- have changed in many ways since 1829. The MET, as it's known for short, has had to expand its mission and learn to tackle new challenges. The realization that plain-clothes police could help solve crimes led to the establishment of the Detective Division; the challenge of the Fenians, who were willing to blow things up to advance the cause of Irish independence, led to the creation of the Special Branch. The Met now even has special riot control units, some of members of which conducted themselves very poorly indeed in the killing of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, an event which -- though absent the element of race -- had much in common with recent American incidents.

But despite that, Peel's original principles would make as much sense for reforming the police in the UK as for reforming them here in the US where I live. The biggest difference is that the police were imagined primarily as a force to prevent crime, rather than merely apprehending criminals after the fact. But just as important was Peel's insistence that the police must be thought of -- and must think of themselves -- not as a special class of persons with unusual powers, but simply as "members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

"The police are the public and that the public are the police" -- that's the way Peel put it. We could hardly do better to "reform" the police than to re-assert this one-hundred-and-ninety-six year old sense of values.

The Assessment Craze

In the past decade, the movement for education “assessment” has reached a fevered pitch, moving from public elementary and high schools into higher education, at least at most state colleges and universities.  This has been done, ostensibly, in response to a public demand for “accountability,” another loaded word, and this demand has been translated into the most absolute of terms. At my own college, every department and program was, in essence, ordered to develop an assessment plan.  The buzzwords of these plans – rubrics, targets, educational outcomes, and so forth – came along with the orders, though each department was ostensibly free to decide what they would describe as their “outcomes,” and how they would say they would meet them, and measure their success in doing so. And it came with a not-so-veiled threat: if you don't come up with an assessment plan, we'll come up with one for you.'

The next step in this utilitarian, quality-control notion of education, of course, was to make sure that these "outcomes," elaborately measured and assessed, were used to reform -- or more precisely, to penalize -- the educators and pupils who failed to meet the chosen benchmarks. It's a notion so forward-looking that it takes one right back to the 1860's, when Lord Palmerston's government promulgated regulations stipulating the each pupil failing their exams on a prescribed subject would result in the school losing 2s. 8d. in the next year's funds. As the eminent Victorianist Richard Altick describes it, "a new premium was put upon rote memory, for throughout the year every effort was bent toward grinding into the child the sentences or the facts the inspector might demand of him." Bradley Headstone, Dickens's dark schoolmaster in Our Mutual Friend, could hardly have been more pleased.

The word "education" comes from the Latin ex-ducere, “to lead forth" and shares a root with “Duke.”  But it can also mean “to draw forth,” and shares this sense with ductile, meaning stretchable or pliable, as with ducts, and duct tape.  On the difference between these two senses a whole worldview depends: if to educate is to lead, to command, to instill by and with authority, then doubtless it makes sense to see how good one’s pupils are at following instructions, mastering principles, and learning protocols.  But if it means more to “draw forth” -- and this is the shade of its meaning I would emphasize -- then it is not a matter of commanding, but of encouraging students to stretch and bend their minds, making pliable the rigid postures into which authority, and life, have pressed us.   The first sense can be measured, up to a point: I’m sure many baby-boomers such as myself remember the 20-item quiz, which began with with “read all questions before you start” and ended with item 20 being “put down your pencil and don’t answer any of the questions.”  But mental ductility, unlike that of physical materials, is almost impossible to quantify, since some part of it necessarily involves breaking the rules, thinking outside of one’s ideological confines, and questioning presuppositions.

There has been, I will admit, an attempt to take cognisance of this vital quality -- the phrase that is usually used is “critical thinking.”  English professors such as myself generally like this phrase; to us it suggests a complex array of thought and capability.  But what is it, and how might we measure it? One current test defines it as “analyzing problems, generating logical and reasonable approaches to solve and implement solutions, reflecting consistent value orientations” (CTAB). Another assessment rubric recently discussed in my department speaks cryptically of “breaking down informational materials,” “using previously learned information in new and concrete situations” and “creatively or divergently applying prior knowledge.” Such definitions offer little encouragement; to me, they sound more like a plan for recycling than a definition of innovative or genuine analysis. But it matters not: in essence, all these plans are, at their foundations, anti-intellectual assaults on genuine learning.  For true learning is not a plan, not a fixed process, and very rarely a readily-measurable thing. As Albert Einstein -- a famously slow learner - observed, "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom."

I've been teaching at the college level since 1986 -- thirty years and counting. If this new regime of supposed "assessment" has its day, then higher education as we've known it will soon be coming to a close, to be replaced by a utilitarian yardstick that knows no value other than, or beyond, mere functionality.  Would the last person in the university please turn out the lights?

I'm J.K. Rowling ... and so's my wife!

It's an infamous scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian (and a sly parody of Kubrick's Spartacus): a centurion arrives at the place of crucifixion with orders to release "Brian" -- but he  he has just one a problem, which one of these poor sods hanging from crosses is Brian? He takes the practical route: "Where's Brian of Nazareth?" he calls out, "I have an order for his release!" And then, one by one, everyone (except of course the real Brian of Nazareth) starts calling out "I'm Brian!" "No, I'm Brian!" -- after which one especially bold fellow calls out "I'm Brian! And so's my wife!"

Needless to add, the real Brian isn't rescued. And that's how I felt about the recent bru-ha-ha over J.K. Rowling's try at a pseudonymous other authorial life as "Robert Galbraith." It's certainly her right to have given it a try -- if I were as well-known for one series of books as she is, I can imagine wanting to escape and re-invent myself. And, as she explained when the whole thing was uncovered, she'd done it very discreetly -- so much so that The Cuckoo's Calling was given the usual treatment accorded first-time novelists whose book hasn't been singled out for a big campaign (that would be most of them): some review copies were sent out, the proper ISBN's and ASIN numbers were sent to major retailers, along with a few copies of the book. It garnered some good reviews, too -- but, just like others of its seeming kind, it sold around 1,000 copies. Tell me about it -- I've been there.

Which is perfectly fine, I suppose, except for what happened once Rowling's authorship was revealed -- the book shot to #1 on the bestseller lists, and the publishers hastened to print the hundreds of thousands of copies they now knew it would sell. As James Stewart commented in the New York Times, it was not just a depressing sign of how little effort publishers put into promoting most new novels, but of how difficult it is to promote a book at all. One can Tweet, and blog, and Tumble all one wants; one can give readings to as many near-empty bookstores as one can stand; one can whisper into as many grapevines as one wants -- but there's no way to make sure a new book, however good it may be, escapes being swept away in a greyish fog of indifference. In one especially sad consequence of the success of the Harry Potter books, Bloomsbury -- which went from tiny publisher to UK giant on the sales of Rowling's books -- no longer even has a slush-pile, which was where the first Potter book's manuscript was rescued from obscurity.

But maybe there is a way. After all, we don't know whether this is Rowling's first outing in disguise. She might well have written others, and who knows under how many names. In fact, it seems to me that she might possibly have written my novel, and perhaps those of other lesser-known writers as well. How could one prove otherwise, in an age when denial is the strongest sign of the truth of what's denied.

So I'll say it now: I'm not Russell Potter (wasn't that name a bit of a give-away?) -- I'm actually  J.K. Rowling.

And I'd encourage every other writer I know to say the same thing. Go ahead, prove us wrong! Conduct a computer analysis of our writing habits, track down the falsified contracts, call the publishers' representatives.  In the meantime, while all that's going on, we'll be enjoying selling more books in a day than we have in the past five years.

But seriously: I feel for J.K. Rowling. It's been harder to her to publish something under a pseudonym than it was for Prince Hal to pass unnoticed among his troops at Agincourt. But if she really wants to earn some respect from the actual "Robert Galbraiths" of the world, she should tell her publishers to re-open that slush pile. Heck, she might try reading a few manuscripts herself. 

Literature is bad for you

With attacks on the humanities -- and on my field of English in particular -- coming from every direction, I feel that it's time to consider some new and perhaps radical strategies to promote the reading of literature in these attention-span dwindling days. What was the last straw? Was it when a student in one of my classes condemned Edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom" as "too detailed"? Was it when a student in the midst of a discussion of Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House asked whether its author was mentally ill? Or perhaps it was the day that someone asked whether, since they'd already read Hamlet in eleventh grade, they'd have to read it "all over again" in my class?

We who teach literature labor under a false premise: that if a teacher or college professor tells young people that a particular book or author is "good" for them, that they'll a) take our word for it; and b) read it. But what if our saying that it's "good" is precisely the problem? After all, none of the propaganda about the virtues of spinach, whole wheat bread, or tofu has made any of those foods more popular with teenagers. And what sort of honor is it, anyway, to have one's work declared to be a "classic"? I think with sorrow on the moment when Groucho Marx, who was having dinner with the poet T.S. Eliot, boasted that his daughter was studying "The Waste Land" at Beverly High. "I'm sorry to hear that," the great poet had replied, "I have no wish to become compulsory reading."

And herein lies the dark essence of my plan: instead of saying that reading literature is good for you, I think we should start telling people it's bad for them. After all, it has some serious side-effects: for a time, at least, the reader believes in, and worries about, the travails of completely non-existent people. Their hearts beat faster, they break out in a sweat, they turn the pages feverishly -- all in the quest to discover the fate of a woman or a man who has never lived. No less a light than St. Augustine condemned Virgil's Æneid for this reason: why should he be made to weep for Dido, a woman who was little more than a chimera created by a whiff of words, when his own immortal soul, not yet confessed unto Christ, was in so much greater and more profound peril?

The Irish novelist Flann O'Brien put it succinctly: a novel, like a drug, is self-administered in private, and its key effect is to convince the user of the reality of nonexistent beings. So why not regulate, or better yet, ban it, as we do other hallucinogenic drugs? Asking kids to read novels over their summer vacations is little better than popping LSD in their lunch-bags: the results will be much the same. Warning labels, at least, seem to be in order. Searches of backpacks should be conducted at every school, and every one of these illusionary text-drugs confiscated. Libraries? Let them, like those of Dickens's Professor Gradgrind, contain nothing but facts. A book which consists of facts, after all, does not deceive its readers into believing in the reality of imaginary people or places. Teaching literature? Eliminated. Let those who still wish to read novels be obliged to purchase them illegally, on street-corners, and hide them within paper bags until they reach the safety of their homes. And as for e-books, well -- aren't e-cigarettes, as much as the older, match-lit variety, little more than drug delivery vehicles? Fortunately, amazon.com can easily delete all fiction from the Kindle readers of offenders, refunding the cost so that users can more wisely spend their funds on non-fiction and works of reference.

And then, finally, I think you'd get the next generation interested in reading again. The thrill of the forbidden, the discovery of books as contraband, and the risk of arrest would make books cool. People would brag about scoring a gram of Poe down on the corner, or dropping a little Shakespeare in some dark alley. Bootleg editions of Woolf and Cather would be printed with plain brown covers, and once more, you'd have to smuggle copies of Joyce's Ulysses across the border inside boxes labelled "sanitary towels." Underground book groups would form, and meet in secret, shifting locations, the address sent out via encrypted e-mails. Oh, sure, there'd be some places -- Amsterdam, I suppose -- that would tolerate fiction, setting up "reader parks" where you could openly turn the pages of Kerouac or Kesey. But we'd all know that would never work; fiction is just a gateway drug, and the only solution is one of zero tolerance. For, as the town manager in Terry Gilliam's Munchausen notes, we can't have people escaping at a time like this.

What's a Book?

The late great Maurice Sendak, irascible and sharp as ever in his last interviews, had this to say of e-books: "I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book." It's a hard quote to improve on, but it's also worth considering, really: what is a book? And is an e-book really a book at all?

I'd say that, to be a book, whether material or virtual, there are a few basic qualifications -- I can think of six off the top of my head:

• A book must contain readable text.
• It must be portable -- the ability to take a book anywhere is one of its key strengths.
• The text must be persistent -- that is, it should still be there if you go away and come back again later.
• You should be able to do what you want with it: store it, loan it, give it away, bequeath it, and (yes) destroy it if you have a mind to.
• It should be able to be annotated, written in, drawn in, dog-eared or place-marked. Call it "interactivity" if you like.
• It shouldn't vanish unexpectedly. And, if undisturbed, it should last for years.

So is a typical e-book a book by these measures? In most cases, no. It meets the first two criteria, yes -- but is it persistent? Some e-books leant by libraries expire after a certain date and can no longer be read; some e-books can only be read in certain places (as with Barnes & Noble's 'share-in-store' café feature) -- that's not real persistence. The fourth qualification, though, is the biggest stumbling block: almost no commercial e-book format allows lending or giving of any kind. If, in a lifetime, you amass a library of physical books on which you spend tens of thousands of dollars, you can give it to a friend, leave it to your kids, or donate it to a library. If you did the same with e-books, you'd have nothing -- your death would be the death of every e-book you'd bought.

Annotation? Some platforms allow this, and there's even one model in which one can see other peoples' annotations -- wow, just like a book! There are "signed" e-books never touched by an author's hand. But if the lifespan of an e-book is uncertain, the duration of these user-added annotations is even more questionable.

And disappearing? Amazon.com famously deleted copies of Orwell's Animal Farm from its users' Kindles, kindly crediting them 99 cents, after the company was informed by the Orwell estate that the book was still in copyright -- talk about Orwellian. And there's nothing to say Amazon or some other vendor couldn't do it again. What's more, if you decided not to be an Amazon customer, or not to replace a broken Kindle, or if Kindle were to be replaced by some hardware or software that wasn't backwards-compatible with older e-book formats, then your books would have vanished for you.

Lastly, what would one make of some archaeologist of the far future, coming upon a buried e-library? If Amazon didn't exist in the future, there'd be no way to recover these battered e-readers and tablets -- their data was mostly stored on cloud that once floated in the sky of a lost civilization. And like clouds, there'd be no getting them back.

So I suggest a label, or some sort of certification: Only e-books and readers that met the six criteria above would be certified as genuine "books" -- everything else would have to use some other word: text-sacks, wordblobs, readoids, or libri-fizzles. Anything but "books."

(illustration from wikimedia commons)