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The book publisher Penguin is printing more copies of George Orwell's dystopian classic "1984" in response to a sudden surge of demand.
On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning the book was #1 on Amazon's computer-generated list of best-selling books.
[...] "We put through a 75,000 copy reprint this week. That is a substantial reprint and larger than our typical reprint for '1984,'" a Penguin spokesman told CNNMoney Tuesday evening.
[...] According to Nielsen BookScan, which measures most but not all book sales in the United States, "1984" sold 47,000 copies in print since Election Day in November. That is up from 36,000 copies over the same period the prior year.
When the submitter visited amazon.com, the book was ranked #3.
Additional coverage:
- Los Angeles Times
- The New York Times (may be pay-walled)
- 9News
- The Washington Post (owned by the founder of amazon.com)
- The Guardian
- The Man Who Invented the Science Fiction Paperback
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:24PM
I'm not so sure about that. We already have:
- The NSA monitoring all of the US communications networks for anything they deem suspicious past and present. This is the culmination of the Total Information Awareness project that started back in 2001 or so, and has been continuing in various levels of secrecy ever since (and TIA was also the result of some stuff that the Clinton administration was up to like Echelon).
- The FBI as well as local police forces can and do send in undercover cops to spy on political and religious organizations, including those with no intentions of criminal activity.
- A press that quite happily does the bidding of whoever is in political power at any given moment. Even the ones that are supposedly slanted towards the other party. And as of last Friday, journalists are being arrested and charged with crimes if they report something the administration doesn't like.
The only thing missing would be bounties to turn in your friends and neighbors if they start saying the wrong thing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:02PM
You mean: See Something, Say Something
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:15PM
Not the same. But that's just the thing - we no longer need a network of informers turning in their neighbors and relatives. With every phone call being recorded and keyword-indexed, every email added to the DB, everyone's web browsing monitored, there's just no point in the informants.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:54PM
The informants are useful for 2 major reasons:
1. To keep people from speaking and organizing in person. Including in an unorganized fashion: Bob complains about government policy at the bar on Thursday night, Friday he no longer has a job and for some reason can't get another one in his field, that kind of thing.
2. To create an endless supply of enemies that have to be located, imprisoned, and tortured. Which justifies spending even more on surveillance, prisons, and torture. It is vitally important that the enemy never be completely defeated, and informants turning people in on false information that can never be disproven is a good way of keeping a good supply of enemies.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Thursday January 26 2017, @07:57PM
Even China no longer needs informants to achieve these goals. Theoretically you can keep things voice-only and fly under the radar, but that's increasingly alien to young people.