A Christmas e-book stack
December 24th, 2006After the roaring success of bloglily’s Christmas book stack, I wondered whether the concept could at all be translated into the digital world. A (fortunately fictional) illustration is worth a thousand pages of e-speech:
Bro (unwrapping): OK, now, what is this wee present here? Oo, nice, a USB stick, thanks! Who’s it from?
Me (uneasy): well, no actually, it’s an e-book stack. And um, technically the USB stick is mine … could you please give it back once you’ve copied the e-books to your computer?
For all the esteem and respect I have for e-books, I have to admit that they make a miserably pathetic Christmas gift. Whence I can draw two conclusions:
- either our culture is still too materialistic to appreciate the quintessential soul of books when devoid of their sexy cellulose flesh,
- or e-books are a miserably pathetic Christmas gift, period.
In any case, too bad.
LOL! That’s what one would call a truly modern Christmas gift. Merry Christmas, and may you continue to remain geeky next year
!
Okay, this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time (well, besides David Rakoff, but he doesn’t count, because I’ve been raving about him for too long now).
P.S. You can give me a stack of ebooks anytime, please.
Ha! I’ll tell you, I sure wish I had thought to give e-books, highly esteemed or not, silky or no — it took forever to wrap all those books. By the time I finished, I never wanted to see another piece of tissue paper ever, ever, ever again. Happy New Year dear Mandarine.
I did get myself an enormous pile of free e-books as a Christmas present and have practiced on-screen reading more than I had ever done before.
I will probably set up a page here about e-book resources, about what it is to be a distributed proofreader for the Gutenberg Project, about what I have read or what I intend to read, and about how to transform plain e-texts into fine e-books (this one I promised to Litlove).
I think that what’s missing in the e-book stack is the nice wrapping paper and the ribbon. Yes, it takes forever to wrap the presents and No, it’s not ecologically-correct, but I like the colors and the noise it makes when you tear the paper up… I guess any computer can replicate that noise too, if necessary. Happy holidays!