Why I hate books

When I was in 7th grade, I took a Journalism elective course.  Part of our coursework involved perusing through newspapers for ideas, and I hated this process as much then as I do now.  I liked the course, but I hated reading through newspapers.  I remember one day when I was fed up, I became vocal about it (a common occurrence), and said something similar to the following:

“Ugh, I hate newspapers.  How can we think it’s okay to have to dig through these large, bulky, cumbersome papers that fall apart all the time?  And to make things worse, the articles are never contiguous; you have to jump to some random page to continue the one you started, only leading to more of a mess on your table.”

At this point one of the other students became frustrated at all my complaining, and retorted:

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you make something better!?”

Well, thankfully other people did this for me.  With the World Wide Web and hypertext becoming popular a few years later, newspapers became irrelevant – well, to me, anyway.  Finally, I felt like I was living in the proper decade at least as far as they were concerned.  But this still hadn’t solved the problem with books.

I hate books.  I can’t stand them.  I’m 31 years old and I’ve hated them since I was young.  But it’s not reading that I hate; it’s the form factor of books (and to a greater extent, newspapers).  Reading a book is an activity that is expected to commonly consume long stretches of time, yet books themselves are very poorly designed for this.  There are very simple reasons why, but we’re so programmed from early childhood to merely accept these as “the way things are” that most people think it’s foolish to even raise the objection.  Well, allow me:

- Books, by and large, don’t automatically stay open to the page you’re reading.  You have to manually hold the book open, which is easy enough if you’re reading a page or two, but highly annoying for large periods of time.  The problem becomes worse when you try different reading positions.  Try reading a book while laying on your side, on your bed, for long periods of time.  I guarantee you’ll be uncomfortable within a matter of minutes – either your arm, your back, or your neck.  You’ll find yourself, as I do, constantly turning, switching hands, and shifting around to avoid putting too much strain on a single muscle.  And somehow, nobody complains.

- Assuming you’ve managed to keep your book open and get your allotted amount of reading done, you’ve got to make sure to put a bookmark in it to remember where you left off.  Don’t forget!

- What if you want to search for a particular part of the book, either when a certain event occurred, or where a certain topic is discussed, etc.  Well, this involves scanning through pages manually until you find what you’re looking for.  Or if it’s a textbook, you search the index in the back.  That’s right, this is not a joke: these books have manually-created, fallible indexes in the back which serve to point you to the correct page.  This was necessary back before the computer revolution, but we live in the 21st century.  The fact that we merely accept this as the way things are without trying to improve it is sad.  How many times have you been frustrated trying to find something in a textbook that wasn’t properly included in the index?

- And what if you want to quote part of the book in an article / report / blog entry / email / etc.?  Well, you just read it verbatim and write it down somewhere else, careful not to make any mistakes.

- Uh oh, now it’s nighttime and there’s no natural light.  Better find a reading location near a lamp, or get one of those cute little book lights.  Books don’t light themselves, you know.

- Books can be large, heavy, and take up a lot of space.  Not necessarily, of course, but if you’re like me you read a lot of giant reference texts, and the occasional giant Harry Potter novel.  Packing either of these on a trip is inconvenient, and God forbid you want to bring multiple.  Nevermind the fact that you have to have some place to store your library in your home, i.e. a giant bookshelf.  Time to move to a new home?  Better pack up all those books!  (Anyone who has made the mistake of packing boxes full of books knows just how heavy they are; and they tend not to make this mistake twice.)

- Tens of millions of trees are cut down each year for books in the United States alone!  I am not an outspoken environmentalist, but this is just needless.

 

I swear I was born about 15-20 years before my time.  I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting for the world to catch up to my expectations.  Finally, there’s hope.  With the Amazon Kindle and similar readers, we were given products that could solve every single one of the problems I mentioned above.  The new Apple iPad makes the story even better, presenting a multi-purpose content consumption device that can not only store your entire book library but your entire audio library as well (and for some people, their entire video library, but we’ll have to wait just a little longer before that’s true for everyone.)