E-Books: Ew

Published Mar 20 2008, 03:18 PM by Sharon Steel

We love the Interweb! (Except when it tries to break our blog.)

But you know what we don't love? E-books. E-books are gross. It's like, we and nearly everyone else we know with day jobs spend hours upon hours staring at a screen and reading the Internet all day long. Everyone reads a different Internet. We like to read about literary gossip (um, duh), regular gossip, music, criticism, musical criticism, literary criticism, clothes, media, and more assorted esoteric shit. But you know what we don't like to read on screens? BOOKS. Excerpts are fine. Reviews are fine. Author interviews, again, fine.

NOT books.

Not our beloved Pride & Prejudice.

Reading a Pride & Prejudice e-book is like watching the Kiera Knightly/Colin Firth superfilm, which was NOT SUPER. It's fake! It's bad and wrong! Um, we prefer the BBC version. Obviously! That, friends, THAT, could never be as good -- nothing could ever be, really, let's be honest -- as the book, but it's close! Oh, it is close!

We know e-books must make things a million times easier for people like, say, editors. They can load up all their manuscripts into the thing and just carry that around, instead of a thousand pound canvas bag (we've seen it happen). And we know e-books also have other, added, educational, environmental, and otherwise extremely practical purposes. We just don't care to think of them.

Because. Well. We hate them! We never want to read a book that way! Especially not anything by Jane Austen. No, no, no. We reject these technological developments. We prefer to read novels in an "antiquated" manner. Fuck e-books. We're just saying.