Good Man in the Fight: Sherman Alexie

Who doesn't love Sherman Alexie? Well, maybe Jeff Bezos.

Alexie is under fire, to some extent, for his remarks at BEA where he announced his opposition to the Kindle. 

It was reported in the main NY Times article about BEA, which mentioned:

At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.

Hence the brouhaha, resulting in Alexie stating on his blog:

In the aftermath of my recent public comments about my fear and loathing of Kindle and its kind, I have received a few dozen amazing, passionate, and compelling emails about the power and beauty of electronic books (and many more hilarious ones questioning my sanity, my morality, my anger management ability, and my writing skills). I have been especially humbled by those Kindle readers who, because of various physical issues, can only read with the machines. While I still have serious qualms about the technology, I have been challenged and emotionally moved enough to take a long-requested meeting with the folks at Amazon and Kindle and listen to their arguments for the machines. I'm on Amazon's list of most-requested authors whose fiction is not available electronically, so now, thanks to the beautiful emails I received, I will do my best to enter the meeting with an open mind. And I definitely promise that I will not beat up anybody at Amazon or Kindle

You can see the smirk, can't you? But honestly, how sensitive must we demand Alexie be!I respect him for listening to readers and taking the meeting, but I also hope he holds his own as being against the monopoly Amazon has on these readers. He has the popularity to make demands. He needn't promise violence, but he should continue to boldly demand answers.