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They never stay open. I can hardly think of another activity that
causes the kind of constant, never ending annoyance that I get from
books always wanting to close themselves. I mean come on, we can
walk on the moon, but we cannot come up with a binding technique
that lets me read a book with ease and comfort? Ridiculous. I seem
to remember that the old printed GNU manuals, like that yellow
Emacs Lisp manual, had a special binding that caused them to lay
flat like a spiral notebook. Whatever happened to that?
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They are heavy. An even remotely nomadic lifestyle is prohibitive to
owning more than just a few books. Books will constantly have to be
given away, which means one can never read one again, or look
something up.
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They gather dust. Granted, they're not the only things in my
apartment that are covered with dust, but every once in a while, I do
clean house, and I always dread the books the most. How do you get
that yucky layer of dust off of them?
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They are difficult to hide. I would like to exclude issues of
censorship, political persecution, and the like from this discussion
entirely. These things are too serious to be dealt with in a few
sentences; besides, I don't believe that we have enough data to know
how the distribution and consumption of books in electronic form
affects or is affected by repressive and totalitarian
governments. However, there is a kind of attempted censorship that is
rather harmless (although I suspect that it carries the seed of the
real one), yet extremely annoying. It primarily affects people who
tend to be interested in a variety of ways to view the world, and
whose book selection will, accordingly, span more than one belief
system, or perhaps even contain works that defy assignment to any
particular belief system at all. When people come to my place, they will
almost inevitably see the books I own, and quite frankly, I am sick and
tired of having to listen to “What, you're reading Ayn Rand?” and
“Noam Chomsky, you have got to be kidding!” and “Knut Hamsun, you
can't be serious!” Screw you, I read whatever I want, and if it's on
my Kindle, then you won't even know, and I won't have to waste my
precious time arguing with you about it.
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