Via James Long
Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age » Fahrenheit Four-fifty What?: Bookstore owners begin to burn books
As has been reported over the last week or so, self-described bibliophiles Tom Wayne and Will Leathem, owners of the Kansas City bookstore Prospero’s Books, have begun to burn their inventory of 50,000 titles after they could not sell or even give the books away. In a scene that really can’t help but sound like it’s from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, over Memorial Day weekend the two men dragged a few boxes of books to the sidewalk in front of their used bookstore, showered them with lighter fluid, and then set the whole thing ablaze. The books burned until the fire department came to put them out.

But this was no Nazi bonfire. It was more like the Buddhists in Vietnam in the early ‘60s who committed suicide by setting themselves on fire as political protest. Neither Wayne or Leathem feel that books should be burned or destroyed — on the contrary, they’re both ardent booklovers — but they’re doing this to attract attention to the fact that books are, well, no longer receiving any attention.

(read on at the link above)