21.Jul.2009 | Sara Nelson
Lady Chatterley’s Vook?
At first, um, blush, the fact that today is the 50th anniversary of the ruling that allowed D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be published in this country has nothing to do with technology, or ebooks or vooks. But in an excellent op ed in today’s New York Times, the writer Fred Kaplan makes a point about how standards of acceptability always have, have to and always will change with the times. Yes, a brilliant lawyer named Charles Rembar figured out how to overturn obscenity laws regarding this DH Lawrence classic, but it was his forward-thinking nature that helped.
Today, ebooks are still somewhat out of the mainstream; vooks are just being invented. And surely there have been and will be arguments not only about their viability, but about the rights and laws surounding their production and dissemination. “For many decades, the courts upheld racial segregation,” Kaplan writes, “then suddenly they didn’t . . . Laws hadn’t changed; society did.” And so it will be with attitudes and fears about nontraditional books, whatever their format or content.
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