A recent commentary at Publishing Perspectives, Ed Nawotka brings what should have been (but wasn’t) THE question of the technological age to bear on the question of the moment: “Is Publishing’s Obsession with the Kindle and iPad Elitist?”

As Nawotka frames it,

Recently, I have heard several digital publishers across Latin America and South East Asia argue that the ongoing obsession with Kindle and iPad is shortsighted at best, and elitist at worst. These publishers (whom we will discuss at length in a forthcoming issue of Publishing Perspectives) feel that the readers in their nations, be it Columbia, India, or Indonesia, are just as avid consumers of digital reading materials as those in richer nations, but the high cost of the Kindle and iPad make them inaccessible to most consumers.

He doesn’t take it any further (although he does note that, “The phone is cheap and nearly ubiquitous all over the globe. Could focusing on developing for feature phones — or at least channeling content through an appropriate API — offer a greater number of people, not all of them in rich nations, greater access to the world’s intellectual wealth?”). And he doesn’t dare to note the obvious — that thus is the technology of the print book far superior to the ebook. And of course, you don’t have to go out of the country to observe that the question is just as valid domestically as in the third world.

But still, it’s about time someone raised the question: are ereader advocates taking the most democratically accessible technology of all time and replacing it with crowd control?