BOOKS, GO TO HELL!!!

I have kept quiet about this for a long time.  When there first started to be ebooks lots of people had a lot to say about how wonderful "real" books are, how they look, how they smell, how they feel and how tragic it is that because there are now ebooks apparently all that will vanish forever.  Which it actually won't. Well let me tell you I have read books.  I have read far more books than the average literate person.  I may not have read more than you, dear reader, because I am fortunate in knowing some pretty damn literate people, but I know for sure I have read books you have never even heard of.  I know I can get on any city bus or walk into any supermarket and I have read more books than every person there combined will read in their entire lives.  My sister and I spontaneously began reading at age 4, and starting at about 14 I read books every day for over 30 years.  So I have had some experience with real books.  I have had so much experience that I actually began to run out of resources.  I had read everything I wanted to read that was readily available.  I got to the point that I was sending off by interlibrary loan to a university library in Montana or West Virginia just to read Life In London by Pierce Egan, in which the character names Tom and Jerry originate; or Philip Dru, Administrator by Col. E. M. House (said to have been President Wilson's eminence grise) - a future fantasy in which the concepts of the League of Nations and the U.N. allegedly first saw the light; even an obscure novel by John Lymington, maybe the eighth version of the same story he wrote over and over again; all just because I needed to see those things for myself.  Finally I ran out of steam and for the past three or four years I read fewer than half a dozen books a year.

Then I had some experience with ebooks.  My sister-in-law sent me her old Palm pda, an already outdated piece of hardware that looks vaguely like a big clunky smartphone of some sort.  I let it sit around for a while and didn't really do what I had wanted to do with it, put ebooks on it to read.  Finally I started by loading a few things from Project Gutenberg onto it.  It took over a year for me to really use it but in the past few months I have read more books than I did in the preceding year.  Just obscure bits of popular culture, nineteenth century stories of Scientific Crime Detection  or French Master Criminals that I had seen mentioned off and on for years.  I got caught up on Sherlock Holmes.  I read Sophocles and Aeschylus and a couple of their contemporaries I can't even remember the names of.  I read a novel about a young go-getter who saved the mayor's daughter from runaway horses and became the youngest ever advance man for a traveling theatre company.

I have also seen a hell of a lot more movies than most people and one thing for certain is that when things finally start to seem okay, look out.  The guy driving the dynamite truck looks over at his pal and says, "You know, this ain't such a bad job.  I've just got this feeling that everything is going to work out fine." Then the tire hits a rock and over the cliff they go.  Just when I was really enjoying ebooks and reading them every day, the machine died.  Right in the middle of When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Oscar Micheaux's autobiography, and The Case of the 16 Beans by Harry Stephen Keeler.

 I know what books look, smell and feel like, and from the very beginning of the ebook thing, reading those essays lyrically acclaiming the effect of inhaling the dust of oxidized cellulose and fondling grubby old bindings I thought, "Here we go again.  The same thing they went through when card catalogs were replaced and when CDs started outselling vinyl."  Sorry, but I have got no time for nostalgia because I have lived in the past and I am alive now and now is better.

We have got ten thousand books in this house, and that is not using ten thousand as just a big number, but literally and factually we really do have ten thousand books in this house, or more.  We have books in every room of this house except the bathrooms and the breakfast nook - hundreds of them per room.  I don't want to read any of them.  The ones I have already read I don't want to read again and the ones I haven't read I never shall read.  For some reason even though I don't have the slightest bit of use for them as books I am stuck as their guardian for the rest of my life just because somebody sometime might want to read them.  When I got done with an ebook I deleted the file, not because I needed the space - I could have put hundreds of them on the little memory card the size of a two-cent stamp (that's another thing nobody wastes their time rhapsodizing over any more by the way) - but because I was done with them and wanted them gone.

Books.  They come into the house every week, by the boxful.  They sit on the "dining room" table in stacks eternally.  They come up to my studio in stacks to be repaired and go back down to sit on the table some more.  They go into my wife's office to be listed for sale, and they go down into the basement to wait until someone buys them, and they come back up again to be packaged and sit on the table until they are taken to the post office.  More come in than go out, and half of the ones already here aren't even for sale and will stay here.  I am chained to them for the rest of my life and I have already planned exactly how I would burn this place down, if I did, which I won't ever do.  I promise. 

I don't think any of the people who wrote maudlin essays about the tragic loss of the dear old library card catalog even remember they did that.  I think right now they are browsing their local library online and putting stuff on hold to go pick up later this week.  I don't think anybody wishes their mp3 player came with five thousand twelve-inch-square pieces of mold-splotched basementy smelling cardboard, or that they could enjoy taking their mp3 out of the cardboard sleeve and then out of the paper sleeve and then carefully wipe the surface of it with an mp3 cleaner and blow the fluff off the mp3 needle just to hear one song, and then do it again for the next song they want to hear.  If you do, you are an idiot and get off my planet.

I have read books, and I have read ebooks.  I have searched for books in card catalogs and waited for them to be brought up from the stacks, ordered them by interlibrary loan and waited two weeks for them to get to the library so I could go there and get them.  I can get the same books online right now in five seconds, read them, and be rid of them.  Did you notice I put links up there to a couple of them?  I'm not sure the Egan book is the same one because he wrote a bunch of them, but still you can read them if you are as crazy as me which you are not but even if you did you would not have those books cluttering up your place for the rest of your life.  You can't get everything you want as an ebook, but you can't always get it as a book either.

I have read books and I have read ebooks, and ebooks are better.  BOOKS, GO TO HELL.