While most people had to read George Orwell’s masterpieces in school, it looks like readers are going back to Animal Farm and 1984 as the themes of the books seem to be playing out in real life. Many have been comparing the recent revelations that the National Security Agency is collecting our phone and Internet data to the Big Brother state in 1984 and sales of the books online have surged.
On Amazon's Movers and Shakers book chart, 1984 sits at No. 5, while a collection with both books is at No. 10. A cheaper edition of 1984 is also at no. 14.
Sales of the cheaper edition of 1984 jumped 123 percent today, while sales of the Animal Farm/1984 two-fer is up 263 percent. The Centennial Edition published in 2003 is up a whopping 3,379 percent.
As The Washington Examiner notes, 1984 did just celebrate its 60th anniversary on June 6. That’s the same day that news of the PRISM Internet monitoring program leaked.
The news about what the NSA is doing has sparked a national conversation about the government’s access to our private information. It has since been revealed that a former CIA technical assistant named Edward Snowden was the person who leaked the documents to the press. He worked for Booz Allen and had stayed hidden in a Hong Kong hotel.
image: Wikimedia Commons
