Greetings. I have been asked to write a regular web column for The Inner Swine because Jeff Somers, who bills himself Your Humble Editor, wants to get some regularly updated content on the web site and he is far too lazy to provide such himself. While it would certainly be natural for many of you to simply assume that I am Jeff Somers under some simplistic pseudonym, I assure you I am not, although ‘Tim the Angry Clown' is, quite obviously, a pseudonym. I requested anonymity to protect myself from the rather churlish ‘flames' that Mr. Somers receives on a daily basis via E-mail. Mr. Somers insisted on choosing my pseudonym, thus the ridiculous and obvious nom de plume offered here. What does it mean? I do not know. As with many of Mr. Somers' creative decisions, I believe this one came out of a bottle.
    This column is called Not Here to Amuse You because I will, in each installment posted here, be discussing , for want of a more graceful but equally forceful term, things that suck. I will not endeavor to be humorous, leaving that to Mr. Somers, his cohorts, and his illusionary ‘staff'. Today I have chosen to stay within the technological spirit of a web column and examine a suckage of equal modernity: E-books.
    E-books, of course, are offered to the world as the newest Next Big Thing, the ‘killer app' that will leave traditional publishing floundering in its hi-tech wake. They very well may, considering the financial and technological muscle being put behind several E-book efforts. Their success or failure as a commodity, however, will never remove the tarnish of suckage from their shiny plastic casings. No matter how you turn the matter in your hand, it still resembles nothing more than a turd, and particularly vile one, at that.
    My main objection to the E-book is the limitation of rights and privileges it represents. Consider: when you purchase a book today, you own it. It is an item. You can do what you will with it. Read it at your leisure. Give it away or sell it when you are done. Burn it. Write on it. Photocopy it - it is your possession, and as long as you do not violate this country's copyright laws you are perfectly within your rights. On the other side of that coin, you are free to enter any of the thousands of Used Book stores in this country and purchase a book no matter how old it is, what condition it is in, or, indeed, whether the original author and publisher receive any profits from the sale. In short, when you purchase an actual book you own it.
    This may or may not be the case with the E-book. First, you will not actually be purchasing a physical item any longer. You will be purchasing formatted data which will have to be viewed on some sort of viewer, either a proprietary or open-standard one. There will be no physical book to write on, fold, damage, or give away. Second, even if you were to find some pale joy in simply handing a diskette or beaming a stream of data to a friend, there is no guarantee you will be given rights to do so, and may even be prevented from transferring the formatted data via copy-protection schemes. You will be purchasing a single-use license, in other words, and will not have purchased the right to distribute or re-sell the content. You will be allowed to read the book, and do nothing else with it.
    This kind of firm control of the content is a corporation's dream, and I know, because I work for a large corporation. After all, if you cannot lend John Grisham's latest work to a friend, they will be forced to purchase it themselves, spurring more sales. This will all be placed under the guise of ‘anti-theft', and a seamy underworld of data-thieves will be alluded to. It will all be vapor, however. The main goal is to force everyday people to stop freely distributing a corporation's valuable content. The mere fact that such control is possible confirms my distaste for the E-book, but let us humor the length requirement Mr. Somers gave me and explore some of the less vital but still unpleasant drawbacks of these noxious technologies.
    I was recently at a meeting where someone demonstrated the largest drawback of the E-book. Making a point, he stood up and took a book lying nearby. With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the book across the room. When it was passed back to him, he pointed out that the book was largely undamaged. A slight tear in the cover, some bent pages, a little dirt. The point was, it was absolutely still able to perform its function and deliver the words on the pages to the eyes viewing them. He asked us if we thought an E-book reader would fare so well - probably not. Computers are delicate things not meant to withstand shock, weather, and electromagnetic disturbances. You can drop a novel into your toilet and still read it. I doubt the E-book reader would be equally as durable. The great strength of books, however, is their cheapness, their durability, and they portability. You fold them into your back pocket, you toss them idly into backpacks and suitcases. They require no power source, no hardware, no operating system. They are, in other words, perfect.
    Of course, electronic media and digitized books are valuable. Searchable, configurable text is very useful. Certainly while reading a long and complicated book on any subject the ability to search previous chapters for references to a character or term is valuable. But this should be in addition to the pre-existing usefulness and value of the actually book. Removing the printed book removes all of its value, and all you get back in an E-book is the searchable text, which is of limited use due to the potentially restrictive licensing under which you purchase it. After all, being able to search the entire text of The Lord of the Rings is useful, but if you are not allowed to extract that text in any meaningful way, the usefulness remains in the moment. In the long run, searchable digital text is only slightly more useful than old-fashioned printed text, which is searchable, albeit via the unreliable and slow mechanism of scanning the pages with your eyes. The advantages of traditional, printed books far outweigh the slight advantages of E-books.
    Of course, if my slightly paranoid prediction of the rights you will be purchasing with your E-books does not come to pass, and owning an E-book turns out to be fundamentally the same as owning a printed book - meaning you will be able to copy, lend, resell, print out, and otherwise re-use your copy of the book in question - then the scale of advantages tips towards the E-book, at least in the sphere of usefulness.
    In the sphere of aesthetics, however, the traditional printed book will always win, I think. E-books may get bigger, crisper screens. They may incorporate color and (who knows?) animation. They will never, to my mind, be as attractive as a well-designed book. Even cheap paperback editions have a feel, a look, a scent that is pleasing to the senses  -whereas an E-book is just going to be a hunk of heavy plastic. This may change, and certainly a large part of my affection for the old fashioned book may be a simple programming: I grew up reading books, therefore books seem natural to me. Future generations, raised on E-books, may feel differently. Let's hope not.

    Well, there is your initial dose of suckage. I hope you enjoyed it. I will be posting new editions of this column here on an infrequent basis. If you would like to send me feedback, Mr. Somers has generously set up an email for that purpose: timtheangryclown@innerswine.com. Until next time, remember that everything sucks.