Books Are Our Friends

Note: The following is a work of fiction, written in 1993, fifteen years before Kindle. I moved the dates forward just so it doesn't read strangely. There is no Google Books "All you can read for" program, at least not yet:-)

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How An eBook Reader Destroys Books And Lives

The unabridged digital edition of "War and Peace" for a quarter. Google Books' unprecedented "All you can read for $9.99 /month" promotion. When the Paperless Book Corporation came out with their sleek LCD electronic book viewer in 2011, the half millennium of the printed page was finished. Paperless Book, using the old safety razor trick, sold the standard viewers for $95.00, just below the mass produced manufacturing cost. They had a several patents on the page format and coding and prospered greatly by the "dime a download" licensing fee they charged distributors of electronic books. Out of copyright classics they sold from their own Web site for pure profit.

The old-line publishers fought back, slashing prices and using the latest computer technology of their own to print smaller runs cost effectively. Popular writers benefited from a bidding war and the smart money backed the Internet distribution model. Schools leapt at the opportunity to cut costs and eliminate the annual ritual of battling with parents groups over new texts. A single fee covered all the course books for 12 years of classes, and a library of reference works besides. When the various environmental groups put their good housekeeping seal of approval on the "tree friendly" viewers, the fate of cellulose books was sealed. Being seen with a printed book in a public place could subject the reader to curses, spitting, or even a beating at the hands of the 'Guardians Of Our Non-renewable reSources'. GOONS. The nickname was the only funny thing about them, and it stuck because GOONR was impossible to pronounce.

Around the close of the second decade of the century, the first municipalities began initiating book pickup days. It wasn't in response to a public clamor to dispose of their books, for in fact many people were sentimental about their collections. Several book lovers organizations had sprung up with members acting as independent loaner libraries to fulfill their mutual need to feel real pages turning under their fingers. No, the municipalities needed to fill their contracts for burnable waste at private incinerators that had been built in the Eighties and Nineties on the expectation of ever growing mountains of trash. Some of the same forward looking cities were among the first to move to paperless public libraries, i.e., they sent the books to be burnt to avoid paying penalties to the trash barons.

I cried when I first heard about their burning books. The green movement was firmly behind it, with their talk of inks and acids poisoning the soil in landfills. In the few trash-to-energy plants, where the words of poets and prophets were burned to turn pitiful little steam turbines, tours were organized for school children to stand staring round-eyed at the white-hot pace of human progress. Newspapers and magazines had long since been replaced by telephone subscription services that filled the temporary memory of the viewer over fiber optic lines. We were told that millions of trees a year had been spared, and no one could argue that the streets weren't cleaner.

People like myself were known as hoarders. I was just a little more fortunate than most, plus I'd had an early start. Back before the first electronic books were ever published, I had bought a decrepit old mill building for it's back taxes. Two hundred thousand square feet of no longer prime manufacturing space in Holyoke, Massachusetts. It was a six floor brick and timber building with wood brick floors and twenty-foot ceilings. Water damaged areas of the floors bulged obscenely, breaking open in the worst spots like cubist volcanoes. No window panes survived unbroken on the lower floors, and even the fourth and fifth floors were damaged from a generation of frustrated young pitchers, proving their arms with crushed stone taken from the railway bedding. The building was bounded by two canals, front and back, a highway to the left and a railroad embankment to the right.

Holyoke had at one time been the paper mill capital of the East Coast, if not the world. The very building I had purchased had served as the largest supplier of examination booklets to schools throughout the country. Most of the city's mills had moved south in search of cheap labor and lower taxes in the decades following the Second World War. Paradoxically, a little more than a half century after the German surrender, the European cities looked like they had enjoyed a millennia of unbroken peace, while Holyoke resembled a war zone. Thanks to a brief Federal surplus created by the stock market bubble in the opening years of the 21^st century, there was grant money available for restoration and revitalization of such former industrial centers. I had all of the windows replaced with brown corrugated aluminum and patched the floors with cement. A nice coat of silver paint made the short iron bridge appear safe for the passage of light vehicles, and I opened the doors as a private storage facility.

My main business was with divorced couples putting their things into storage as they moved into smaller places, and household items of families who left New England in their cars, searching for work in the South or the West. I had a few successful years, thanks to our "Anywhere Guarantee", in which we undertook to reunite the far-flung owners with their property by packaging it and shipping via common carrier. All major credit cards accepted. Right from the beginning of the paperless era, I noticed a growing trend. People wanted their furniture and appliances sent, but they wouldn't pay shipping for their books. I threw some shelves up on the sixth floor, and in no time had a voluminous private library. I guess that most of the storage places charged to dispose of books, because word got around. One day, I got a call from a woman who had nothing to put in storage, and simply asked, "Do you take books?"

Our family grew up reading, we all loved books. When I was a child and would thoughtlessly lay a book face down to keep my place, my mother would ask, "Why are you hurting the book? Books are our friends." We normally had a thousand or so books in the house at any time that would rotate through the second hand bookstores and library fund-raisers at the whim of their owners. Mainly we were library addicts, shunning new bookstores and avoiding those volumes with shiny dust jackets and "New York Times Bestseller" stickers adorning their covers. I lived in a world of my choice, escaping into books opened in my lap in the classroom, and journeying into far galaxies on the bus. I read more then I slept, and would defy anyone who claimed that the world they were living in was different, or more real then my own. With the responsibilities of adulthood I had broken the addiction, but I promised myself I'd take it up again at a later date. I often lived for that promise.

One day, in early '19, I had a call from the head officer of the Connecticut River Valley Library Association, asking for an appointment to inspect the premises. I was naive enough to think that they were interested in my growing stock as a resource. It turned out that many of their member libraries were being forced to close, and their books were facing the hungry flames. The more conservative New England towns wouldn't vote the books into the furnace, but neither would they pay to provide storage. The shaken librarian wanted to know if I might consider ....? I accepted one and all.

Competition and a declining population had pretty much ruined the local storage business, so with the exception of book donations, I closed the doors to the public and settled into my role as a hoarder. I didn't really have any neighbors, but I was never lonely for the constant stream of book lovers in and out of the place. Locals referred to my mill as the 'The Monastery', and scared their children with stories about how there wasn't a TV in the place. A group of activists from Northampton, incensed at the proximity of such an ugly reminder of societies past sins, would drive their electric cars down on Sundays and parade with their "Ashes to Electrons" signs. They tried to pressure the fire chief into having the place declared a hazard, but he'd had no sympathy for the cause since they'd gotten hunting and fishing banned on the Quabbin Reservoir Reservation. The years passed quickly as I read and catalogued sixteen hours a day.

The economy took another turn for the worse in the Fall of '33, and the nation was facing a growing electric power shortage. After two decades of warm winters, the New England weather returned to its old pattern, and the local area felt the shortage most acutely. Brownouts, then blackouts daily interrupted the viewing habits of the teeming millions with their hundreds of channels. An unsympathetic foe might have accused the activists of starting their all out campaign against hoarders to deflect criticism from themselves and the direction they had forced on the utility companies twenty and thirty years before. I was inclined to think that without TV, they didn't have enough to do with their time. Whatever the reason, the result was that private collections of books were raided and carried off to the local generators for the few hours of cable entertainment they could power through their fiery deaths. Books didn't burn long enough to make good heating fuel, folks were chopping down the forests for that. The out of practice civil authorities did what they could, but as the cold months passed, the mobs went more and more unopposed.

The fence, the dogs, and the canals kept the early raiders away from my place, but I knew it couldn't last. When I was in town buying food on Tuesday, I heard a sound truck broadcasting the message that there were enough books in The Monastery to keep the local generator going for a month. They set the liberation date for Friday night, the best time for a good mob turnout. I prepared the best I could, removing the decking plates from the bridge, but the canals were frozen solid. I had a good field of fire from the roof, but one man with a rifle has never stopped a mob.

It has been dark for a few hours now, and I can see hundreds of torches approaching. The police told me that they were confident that the surprise arrests of the local GOONS leadership would nip the action in the bud. I suppose they really were pretty confident because they don't seem to have provided for contingencies. I won't be the first hoarder to defend his books, and I know that the penalty for defiance is to be incinerated on spot along with the collection. All the same, I'm staying here with my friends. Funny thing about those GOONS. Maybe it's all that camping they wish they had time for, but they sure love a good fire.

Originally Written on Rehov Aggripas, Yerushalyim 1993

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