This bit of EU madness could prove particularly interesting where books are concerned--and books are specifically mentioned in this ban.

Do they intend to ban all books that contain their size and weight in tiny type on the copyright page if, along with metric measures, those books include English measures? That's the book equivalent of labeling a carton of milk. I've got a book by a prominent Italian scientist whose copyright page clearly says, "6 x 9 x 0.4 inches & 0.6 lb." Will that single inch of tiny type make it a crime to sell the book in the EU?

And what is going to happen to cookbooks published in the U.S. and popular in Europe? I suspect talented European cooks have kitchens fully equipped to follow English measures--they're much better than metric anyway. Is the EU going to ban classic and bestselling cookbooks, many of them about European cooking, simply because they mention cups and teaspoons?

And this isn't even getting into where books are really influential--brilliantly written fiction. Will Shakespeare be banned? How about Mark Twain or J.R.R Tolkien? Will any U.S. author who writes a novel and insidiously slips between the pages propaganda for inches, feet and miles be censored? Will someone who writes a tale set in the Middle Ages have to incongruously slip in metric measures? Will books that take place in the U.S. have to act as if our speed limits were in Km/Hr? If you intend to forcibly metricize Europe, a good novel is a lot more dangerous than the label on a carton of milk.

And what are they going to do about books in a publisher's inventory whose sales don't justify a new and costly print run just for the EU? Will those books no longer be available in Europe? As best I recall, Nazism only banned a few hundred books because they didn't fit its ideology. The EU's ideology will ban, at the very least, tens of thousands of books for ideological reasons.

What are they going to do with books that arrive in the EU in defiance of this ban? Will they burn them in large bonfires while EU officials gleefully dance in front of the flames? It would be apt.

We should recall Emile Zola's famous criticism of official French nineteenth-century anti-Semitic policy in "J'Accuse." Freedom of the press is most important when it is, explicitly or implicitly, a criticism of an official goverment policy. The more the EU claims that going metric is EU policy, the greater our free speech right to defy that policy--in short, to issue a J'Accuse, and accuse EU of practicing metric facism: "Ein Meter, Ein Liter, Ein Kilogram."

Perhaps the best response to this madness would be a mirror import policy by the U.S. If a country bans the import of a category of US product that contains English measures, then that county's exports of the same product to the U.S. would have to include English measures. The law could not be more fair. If U.S. manufacturers have to produce EU-only products with only metric measures, then it's only fitting that EU producers have to produce US-only products. And yes, it would be a silly trade war, but all the silliness would be coming from the EU side of the Atlantic.

And we'd be treating the EU more fairly than they're treating us. We'd have no prohibition on their making dual-measure products that could be sold around the world. It would only be the EU's own domestic ban on English-measure products that would force EU manufacturers to create separate products for the U.S.

--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien