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.