Our world, the world of soft power, where people are persuaded to believe that they want the lifestyle, the commodities, the cheap celebrity, that the money-mongerers want them to want, has done something much more complicated to books than to ban them. Freedom of choice, as it is called, floods the market with trash, so that readers are genuinely bewildered about what is and isn’t worth the time, and books are marketed as five-day-wonder disposable objects.

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Tags: capitalism, times