To Hell With Books, Give Me Data!

Regarding: Kindles Replace Books In Library.

Humans, being the hopeless victims of distraction they are, have turned libraries into giant—REALLY giant—statements about the extent of their commitment to being learned, or at least their commitment to providing the dweebs who want to read a book with somewhere to mingle and not be seen or smelled by normal people.

I say this is being really distracted, because books are simply data conveyances, like bio-terroristic hard drives, which munch up living things called trees to provide people with incredibly inefficient ways to get at the data contained in one lousy book. Stack up a bunch of these books in a warehouse, and let people check them out, and you have a library. Hell, stack them up in your house, and you have a library. And a lot of dweebs are very impressed with their home libraries. I knew a fellow once who measured his in linear feet of biblio-virtue.

And more than this, we have these special libraries, much more prestigious than the usual ones, where they house the rare books, the special books, and especially the rotting, stinking books nobody should see or smell or ever touch. That is why they make you wear those silly white gloves and masks, like you're dissecting an especially diseased toad, which is a fair description of the contents of a lot of the special-and-rare items, and for that matter most books ever written.

At the research libraries, the worship of books, and other junk, is elevated to a great height of utter arrogance and insanity. While people in this country could use some space to actually live in, could use some $ to help out in rough times, research libraries have bunches of space devoted to housing a massive clutter of old, allegedly valuable, foul artifacts, almost all of which could be converted into digital forms, and the space and the air cleansed for better purposes.

Many years ago, I saw this wave coming. I could see how much more efficient it would be if I did not have to go to a big, pretentious, physical building to access the temple of rare books. And more than this how much better would it be if ALL the resources of the library which could be digitized were, and made available to everybody, all at once! Wouldn't that be something like a major advance of civilization?

So, I mentioned that to one of the librarians at the Harry Ransom Center, that wouldn't it be great when we can digitize all these awful stinky old books, so people won't have to physically encounter their rotting corpses anymore? She looked at me as if I had suggested burning down the library, with her inside as a marshmallow. Let's just say she wasn't on the bleeding edge when it came to progress.

Well, now we have finally arrived at that moment I have been hoping for, when libraries are dumping the books, and going digital, and naturally the book fetishists are going crazy, acting like the poor books, which last time I checked a digital resource about this, don't have nervous systems or feelings, are being abused! And worse, the fellow who wants to dump the books, and just hand out Kindles to everybody, has also put up big-screen televisions at the entrance to the library, so people can watch cable channels. And the reaction to this is to accuse him of having not read 1984. Well, of course he has. He just actually got the point of the book, unlike the dummies who took it as some kind of warning about something.

So, just pick up your hands, and wave goodbye. The ancient world and its faulty, fumy forms are finally, thankfully, dying.

And who wants to read a book, anyway?

(jk)