Or, Share Your Books
After a punishing couple of days (OK, weeks) getting projects off my screen and back to their authors, I found myself at loose ends and therefore suggestible this morning at my kids’ school. Does this happen to you? Anyway, another parent took advantage of my fragile state and talked me into helping put stickers on books in the middle school library. Doesn’t matter why—something to do with standardized tests.
So I stuck the stickers and talked to the librarian, who recommended this book. A lot of my clients write YA, and I live with some people who are or shortly will be reading books in that category, so I’m always interested in YA books outside the standard “my life sucks and here’s why” trope. Yes, Little Brother is ages old but still relevant, which is what makes good SF great. If you clicked the link (go on, click it), you found out that the book is free to download. I may still ask my fourth-grader to get it out of the library for me because I dislike reading on screens for entertainment. Ironically, the author of that book that you haven’t clicked to yet is the first person to clearly explain to me why I hate e-readers and why my parents’ generation thinks they are the greatest invention since the remote control.
Basically, it’s because people who use computers as part of their livelihood are doing a lot of things on them at the same time. We click back and forth, running programs in the background, taking email/Twitter/YouTube breaks. Some well-meaning anthropologists, psychologists, and alarmists have undoubtedly written articles on why that’s bad for us, but the real problem is that in front of the computer screen is not a place where we feel comfortable reading for a long stretch. Now a book made out of paper, that’s a signal to the brain to sit still and focus on the words until we get bored or someone interrupts us.
Those who grew up in a simpler era known as the Age Before Microwaves, however, have an easier time of it because an e-reader screen does not put them into a multi-task, short-attention-span mindset. It’s a book. Also? They’re retired, the lucky bastards, so they can sit around all day and read for fun. Much like fourth-graders.
Download the book, or buy a paper copy, or seek it out at your local library, but do at least read the introduction to the digital version, which is about the difference between sharing and stealing, between disseminating and violating. It’s about lighting a spark and the great feeling you get when someone comes back to you and says, “I freaking LOVED that book! I’m going to buy my own copy and everything else that person wrote, like ever.” Which is almost as great a feeling as finding such a book in the first place. If that’s not a good enough reason, consider this: giving away a book these days is an act bordering on subversive.
Leave the politics and rhetoric of intellectual property for the attorneys, who are the only ones making money from the argument, and go share your favorite book with someone in whatever way you see fit. Especially if that someone is a kid—that spark is the most likely to start a lifelong fire.