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BURN ALL BOOKS!
Why ebooks kick the shit out of treeware

BY: DIzzIE [antikopyright 2008]

Most graveyards are already unnecessary. Libraries, art museums, and
academies are not worth the noise of one car gliding down the street.
As a test, try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of
books--how many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!
--Hirato Renkichi, Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement

Public book burnings--why should rednecks & Customs officials
monopolize this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons;
the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against
pornography; schoolbooks (especially Social Studies, Civics, Health);
piles of New York Post, Village Voice & other supermarket papers;
choice gleanings of Xtian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances--a
festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear
autumn afternoon.
--Hakim Bey, Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism


The rotting treeware tome sits dying either on a shelf or in the
hands of a pacified reader, there is no difference. Symptomatic of a
closed propertarian culture, jewels of the diseased decadent who
denigrates the dissemination of information to physical adornment, a
gold-trimmed trophy to place upon mountainous shelf before which the
starry eyed gawk upon when embarking on a pilgrimage necessary to
merely gaze upon, let alone read, the corpus of corpses they have no
actual interest in engaging with. The treeware is by its definition,
indeed by virtue of its very inception, a dead object, a closed and
passive entombment of the world's lore; and thus like a tomb, it is
the treeware tome itself which actively serves to suffocate all
semblance of recombinant reemergence of an erudite fresh-air, thus
let this text itself be the bellows by which we shall burn this
drudgery to the ground, and in doing so will see rise a fiery phoenix
that no rotting corpus shall ever cage again.

Upon unwrapping this always-already dead body presented to us,
flipping through the pages, the knowledge seeker is immediately
locked into the passive role of reader, subject to the authorial
whimsy of the god surrogate who wear the crowns of Author, Publisher,
or Editor. Designed to be read, consumed, absorbed as one absorbs
pacifying medication akin to hemlock.

Contrast all of this morbid drudgery to this, the vibrancy of the
ebook, a shining techno-ekstasis marked by unbridled data exchange,
wherein recombinant resurgence reigns supreme, the bits and bytes of
digital flotsam being free to the wildest manipulation, free not only
from all commercial entanglements along the lines of bookstores and
publishing houses, but much more significantly, free from all
attempts to channel or otherwise restrict the flow of information.

Enough of this congealed pulp drudgery, this cancerous growth we
carry around. I used to steal books from libraries, but I see now
that it was an insufficient tactic, a furtively inadequate maneuver
that did not strike at the root of the prevalent disease. The
treeware tome is a shackle that must be overcome. Make no mistake
about it, this is an open call to proclaim every day Burn a Book day,
to raid publishing houses and place their whole hard drives online,
free to all, and to scan in all remaining books that cannot be
similarly expropriated, and then--and then!--firebomb every single
bookstore, library, and publishing house, burn the motherfuckers to
the ground.

Smash every single printing press, that great lie of the
Enlightenment which succeeded only in its goal of locking down
information, how marvelously treacherous to thusly blend euphoric
Luddism with staunch laudation of technophilic data flow! Burn all
the books, these wretched shackles of congealed authority, and inhale
the fumes of the resultant erudition, finally free in its vaporous
state of transcendence. Oh but don't fret, the firebombs I call into
existence subside only on the plane of aesthetics, for practically
this would indeed be a most illegal venture (and of course this
proves the point...for how could existent State and Corporate
structures willfully allow the destruction of their stranglehold on
information?). Realize that if you support information sharing,
unbridled data dissemination, then congealed treeware tomes and all
who support them are your greatest enemy.

Yet you are still not convinced? You still cling to the same dreary
defenses, the dying rallying cries of the Old Guard of the Printed
Tome? Well then, let us engage you for the briefest of spells in your
game of pragmatics so as to perhaps attempt to rouse you from the
spell which has been cast upon you by those who wish to commodify and
otherwise control information. As distasteful as this rot is, let us
find the bone...

Portability. The greatest lie touted by the treeware fetishists is
their insistance on the supremacy of their bellowed pulped abortion
in the decidedly pragmatic field of portability. 'Try cuddling up in
bed with your computer screen!' they cry. Ah, but is the discussion
not one of ebooks, not computer screens? The ebook itself exists as
pure data, momentarily presented on any screen onto which it is
loaded. From laptops to desktops, from MP3 players and portable game
consoles, from tv screens to projectors, from PDAs to specialized
ebook readers, the ebook is the very essence of portability. And
where, pray tell, can you read a treeware tome, besides, well in the
treeware tome? You, in all seriousness, actually dare to venture a
suggestion that, say a PDA, to take but one form of the plethoric
overabundance of possible ports of the ebook, holding say a hundred
books, is less portable than a single paperback? I laugh at you as I
sneak into your home and set fire to your bookshelf, merrily skating
in the gasoline as I watch my jizm sizzle as it snakes down your
spine, dear vaunted tome, yes I talk to the dead!

Searchability. Have you ever hunted for that charge Rakitin fires at
the young Alyosha (In your family sensuality is carried to the point
of fever. Ha! What a stark, pathologic betrayal of form to speak of
sensualism in a congealed treeware text!) through that voluminous
monster of a tome, flipping across pages until your meaty fingers are
shredded by paper cuts? Ever searched for particular formulae or
flipped furtively back and fro from the index to the body of the
text? Tried to find the context for a particular euphemism you
memorized as a schoolchild? Within an ebook the matter is as simple
as typing in a few keywords and instantly being presented will all
such instances and occurrences. Yet, perhaps you like to piss away
your time in such a manor, much as you grow aroused when you refuse
the aid of a magnet in searching for that one pin in a pile of horse
shit.

Malleability. Are you perhaps an old fool, blinded by madness, who
has wasted away your years squinting at the tiniest of pictograms
which typesetters swear to you do indeed formulate tangible letters?
Do you, perchance, yearn to live in medieval times, and are thus
content to scribe your commonplace book by rewriting twenty-page long
passages? Why, then the ebook will similarly suit you just fine! For,
fret not, you can make the text as small as you want, and likewise
you can still manually transcribe the text as you wish! The only
difference is that, unlike your necrophilic object of attraction, you
are free to modify the ebook as you wish, as is anyone else, is that
what really ails you? The lack of authoritarian imposition, for you
have indeed grown comfortable with the cages and chains afforded to
you by treeware. Change the font size, the font, the background and
foreground colouring, the tint and contrast, all manners of spacing,
extract countless passages with the click of a button, or rewrite
them to your like with a few keystrokes more. Everything is
permitted. The ebooks allows all of this, the treeware book allows
none of it.

Durability. Books burn. That is, indeed, their only real benefit in
my pyromaniacal eyes, but for those that actually care for at least
the potentiality of the information contained therein, tell me if
there happens to be a fire in your domicile, what is easier to save--
a shelf full of treeware, or a USB key that contains thousands of
shelves of ebooks? The book rots, necessitating that it be preserved
in expensive humidified prisons, which further implies that access to
those particularly sickly tomes is tightly regulated; knowledge
denied even more so than other similar specimens. The ebook can of
course also mistakenly be deleted, and yet it can be brought back
with yet another click of the button using free undeletion software,
or the problem could altogether be avoided by easily making multiple
copies of the digital text, which, quite literally, take up
infinitesimal amounts of space when compared to that required to
house multiple copies of their leprous treeware companions. As a
dying last throe in the name of durability, the pulp puppets finally
resort to historical longevity. Treeware has been around for
centuries, ebooks for less than half! And yet, to stick to your
rotting corporeal realm, has not paper been around longer than
plastic--of what consequence is this in the least when comparing
durability?

Sustainability. What's that? You say you simply cannot read text on
a screen lest your eyes start to bleed and your poor head begins to
throb like my presently engorged phallus? Ah, poor reader, but do you
not spend your days reading news stories, blogs, twitter and RSS
scrolls, instant messaging conversations, phone texting friends and
coworkers, exchanging emails, doing calculations, glazing over stock
exchange scroll and news headlines, browsing random websites, and
reading forums? Not only must you then be a celestial archetype of
Purity incarnate (you will doubtless notice this is itself
contradiction of terms, to be sure), but you also actually bothered
to print this dreck out prior to reading it? How delightful, I only
hope that you extend me the courtesy and burn it in disgust! Yet if
indeed this is true, and you do neither of the aforementioned
examples of reading digital text, then perhaps the problem merely
lies in your inexperience. Do you see the little knobs on the edges
of your screen? Yeah, that's it. Try turning them a notch or two, and
you should soon see your screen pleasantly dim to a most unobtrusive
glare imaginable, or at the very least certainly less than that glare
produced by candlelight reflecting off the pages of your despicable
treeware antique. Thus, if it is not already clear: to all those who
insist on expatiating upon the woes of reading screened text, chances
are that you either already do, or you are merely doing it wrong, as
I can now perhaps similarly complain that reading treeware hurts my
eyes when I try to read the book by slicing the pages through my
eyelids, as it is indeed most difficult to read a treeware tome when
ones eyes are overcome with reddened rage.

Availability. 'But not everyone has access to ebooks, or the
Internet, or electricity!' bemoan the treeware troops, curiously
suddenly downing the most selfless of all altruistic demeanors, a
transformation indeed made all the more curious by the fact that
these are often the same creatures who expound upon at length of the
aesthetic arousal they experience from high-quality editions that
line their bourgeois bookshelves, whom you recall we met at the
outset of this tract. But nevertheless, let us gag them with a
simplistic rejoinder: but not everyone has access to printing
treeware books, or printing presses, or ink! Thus, please, do not
fault the ebook for any lack of a sufficient infrastructure that
would easily facilitate ebook distribution. I will only ask what is
easier, to venture to an internet cafe and download thousands of
books onto a portable USB key, or to journey to a library to find
that it has less books there than online? This is of course not to
mention the fact that when one takes an ebook, nothing is missing,
one merely procures a replication, yet when one purchases, borrows,
or otherwise procures a treeware tome, that book is no longer
available to anyone besides the current holder?

Yet another outcry against the digital that approaches visibility
from a different angle, humbly observes 'but you need electricity,
batteries, power, oh my!' This is undoubtedly a truism, at least thus
far in our technological development, and yet, you cannot read
treeware after sunset sans technological assistance either, no? 'But
there is candlelight and hand-powered flashlights,' the bookworms
screech! So too, my friends, is there solar power and reserve
generators. And then of course there is the dubious question of how
your precious treeware is itself produced, if not through a staunch
reliance on industrialization. Let us see the power conserved by
shutting down all industrial printing presses, all publishing
offices, bookstores, warehouses, libraries, and all other power-
absorbing facilities and equipment involved in the treacherous
treeware trade, and let us see what happens when we instead divert
that energy to the production and dissemination of ebooks!

But enough of this, listen closely and you may now hear the mildewed
bookworms yell back, for while it is decidedly true that they always
scream the loudest when they are set alight, even in this instance
their shouts amount to naught more than a dying whimper.

SMASH THE PRINTING PRESS - RAID PUBLISHING HOUSES - FIREBOMB
BOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES - BURN BOOKS - FREE INFORMATION.

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Comments? Get in touch: xcon0 @t yahoo \/d0t/\ c||o|m 
(or call +1 (610) 887-6072)

For more knowledge check out www.rorta.net and www.dizzy.ws