Coming Of (electronic) Age

Finally, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs, "The Singapore Story" and "From Third World To First", are now available in electronic book format. In the author's note to the eBook edition, Lee wrote, "It is my hope that the experiences of my generation find relevance with a generation that grew up with digital literacy and technology."

Lee once said he will call it a day when the retelling of his experiences and stories can fit into a thumbdrive. Capacities for thumbdrives are now in the order of gigabytes (GB), yet the nonagenarian was last seen leading a team for the Tanjong Pagar Group Representation Constituency (GRC) in the 2011 elections. Maybe they were trying to physically squeeze two hard cover volumes into a tiny solid state device. It may sound ridiculous, but we are dealing with folks like his son who recently declared that the "human society was not designed with the Internet age in mind."

The eBook format takes the wind out of that argument. The 2 volumes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf take up only 1 megabyte (mb), 7 books of the Harry Porter series add up to 6 mb, and the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare occupy only 7 mb of disk space. Even “The Untold Story of Mao” by June Chang and Jon Holliday, which includes 1780 pages of text and photographs, require only 6 mb of storage. It is doubtful all of Lee’s books can even fill up a 2 GB thumb drive.

Produced and sold under licence from Singapore Press Holdings (who else?) which owns the publication rights, the memoirs started retailing at $34.99 each from major e-book distributors from Monday 25th August. It's cheaper online. But you can't use it as an expensive door stop.