Sherman Alexie on the Colbert Report

I’ve been interested in Alexie’s argument against e-readers for some time now, particularly his classification of them as elitist, which it seems to me pretty hard to disagree with. But it looks like he’s backing off of that. The arguments he runs through are (1) privacy, (2) the ease of piracy, (3) the cultural move away from artistic ownership, (4) that it’s somehow nobler to go bookstore to bookstore hawking your wares — though I fail to see how e-readers have done anything to diminish local book coverage — and , (5), that local bookstores will suffer.

The only one of those arguments that I have any interest in is the last one. And I find it even more interesting that Alexie never once mentions what was, only a few months ago, the crux of his argument against the Kindle: that they’re elitist. Given the sort of wild casting about for some reason to dislike the things evidenced on the show, it’s hard for me not to believe that he still thinks they’re elitist, but just isn’t very fond of the reaction he elicited when he called them so. Which is kind of a shame.

That said, the show has one of the funniest moments I’ve ever seen, coming when Sherman Alexie refers to himself as an Indian and Stephen Colbert corrects him, informing Alexie that they prefer to be called Native Americans.

Full disclosure: thanks to the wonder of Walmart, I now have a cheap Blackberry on which I’m reading Henry James in every stupid line and stupid meeting I happen to find myself. (Not to mention the occasional stupid conversation.) So much for consistency.