Die, You Piece of Shit Technology, Die.

I like books. In fact, I love books. I love to read and my bookcase is my pride and joy. The one possession in my room I would be sad to lose in a fire – and not even the case, but all the books. It’s what I spend my spare cash on and it’s what I spend my free time doing: books, reading. However, you’d think the tree-murdering consequences of this love for books would weigh down on my conscience and consequently I would be hailing e-books as the lord and saviour, the divine miracle of humanity, the best thing since sliced bread, etc. I hate them. In fact, I hate them so much that in dealing with them, I almost end up destroying the second best thing in my life, my computer. (Nerd, remember.)

So why this hatred for e-books? Well, firstly, let me say that although I don’t own an e-reader, (I still heave a book around in my bag just in case I get bored or have a few minutes to spare) I can understand that an e-reader might be awesome. I’m poor, I don’t have money to buy one, I buy my books second hand and I like my bookcase. Now, if I were to go on a holiday for half a year, I might invest in one because given the amount of reading I do, it’d be impossible to actually carry that amount of books with me in any other form. In any case, I’m fine with this version of the e-book, e-reader and all these tree-saving, weight-saving fancy inventions. What I’m not okay with, is the e-books I have to deal with at university right now.

At this exact moment, I’m sitting in the library and I should be working on an essay. Instead, I’m writing this angry tirade on e-books because the anger is too much for me to carry on writing the essay. You might also call this procrastination, but usually, I’m not this angry when attempting to avoid my essay-duties. So why am I angry? I’ll tell you why I’m angry, it’s because of e-books. Here I am, researching terrorism in the Chechnyan wars and I need a short introduction to everything that has happened, before I can really delve into the subject. So, I think to myself, I’ll just look through the library catalogue, I’m sure someone a lot smarter than me has written something useful on this. And I am right: seven entries that are all pretty  much exactly what I need. And, they’re e-books.

What happens next is the reason I’m so frustrated. Firstly, I can only look at them for five minutes before the website kicks me out. No worries I think, I’ll just save the pages and read them afterwards. DENIED! You can only save the pages through excessive use of the print-screen button and paint. Well fuck that, I’ll just copy paste that shit then. DENIED! It’s not actually any text you can copy paste, it’s an image but you can’t right-click save it either. So I’m left to frantically browse for five minutes, find exactly what I need through speed reading, grabbing my pen to write it down, look up at the page to see what it is exactly that I’m writing down on a dead tree that I wasn’t supposed to kill because of the magic that is e-books and… DENIED! Five minutes are over.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Okay, calm down. They wouldn’t be in the data-base if they weren’t somehow accessible to students, right? Right. I can request to loan the books. I CAN REQUEST TO LOAN E-BOOKS. There goes the advantage of instant availability... grrrreat. Fill in five million forms, wait for a hundred hours until the librarian has time to approve your request and pay the website so that I can access the file for a day, exactly twenty four hours, and then… I’m still fucked. Because I still can’t copy-paste shit, so I have to alt-tab to type out every single thing that I find useful, within this stupid twenty four hour deadline, so that I have to somehow fit all my other activities around the reading of a stupid book. Sure, there are no dead trees, but I’ll gladly take an axe and brutally  murder a tree right now, if that means I can have this book, printed in front of me, so I won’t be stuck in the fucking library for a day and end up murdering my laptop. Type two words, alt-tab back to see what you were typing, two words, alt-tab back, shit, wrong tab, find the proper tab, accidentally close word-document that you were typing in, click no on save, start over, alt-tab to the wrong page again, only 18 hours remaining and you still have to go to dinner with your dad so really it’s only 12 hours remaining, better read faster, alt-tab, two words… DIE, YOU FUCKING SHIT PIECE OF USELESS TECHNOLOGY.

Somehow, somewhere, someone managed to take the concept of e-book and eradicate all the advantages of that concept. Yeah, e-books, a great idea. Let’s just limit the access, and take away instant availability. Let's make sure that people can’t copy paste so it won’t save them any time, in fact, let’s make sure they have to alt-tab between documents constantly so it’ll actually take them even more time. They’ll be so frustrated that they’ll end up taking pen and paper and writing what they read on that paper, then typing it into word later on. Make sure there’s no option for bookmarking either, so they’ll have to get a separate piece of paper (that’ll get lost in the middle of things, so that they’ll have to re-fucking-do their entire bibliography and footnotes at the end of the essay in any case, and request access to a limited time-document yet again because of page numbers) –to write down the fucking page numbers of the fucking information. This is a great idea. Let’s see how long it takes until the peaceful and quiet library becomes an arena of frustrated students that end up slaughtering everyone around them because of these fucking e-books. And film it. It’ll be great.

WELL FUCK YOU.