December 8, 2012

The ultimate reason to switch to ebooks.

Bedbugs!!

That's hot news in the NYT, but of course, insects have been enjoying the nourishment of books for a long long time, and book-readers love to use the metaphor of insects-feeding-on-books for themselves. What do you think a bookworm is?
Bookworm is a popular generalization for any insect which supposedly bores through books. Actual book-borers are uncommon....

A major book-feeding insect is the book or paper louse (aka booklouse or paperlouse).... It is not actually a true louse.

Many other insects, like the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) or cockroach (various Blattodea), will consume these molds and also degraded paper or the starch-based binding pastes – warmth and moisture or high humidity are prerequisites, so damage is more common in the tropics. Modern glues and paper are less attractive to insects....
Even less attractive: iPad, Nook, and Kindle.

21 comments:

McTriumph said...

So, New York City has bedbug infestation because people read too much, instead of just being a very filthy place?

The rat infestation is probably caused by super sized sodas, trans-fat and illegal guns.

m stone said...

John Furman, the owner of Boot-a-Pest, a team of bedbug exterminators based on Long Island...

I'd use the service just for the name.

Shouting Thomas said...

The ultimate reason to use e-books for the programmer is that you can carry your code books with you to the job.

Never write original code when you can steal it from somewhere else!

Palladian said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Palladian said...

So, New York City has bedbug infestation because people read too much, instead of just being a very filthy place?


The article wasn't about New York City.

Get some new material.

MadisonMan said...

Never write original code when you can steal it from somewhere else!

This is so true. I have many an awk program that isn't really mine.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

"The ultimate reason to switch to ebooks."

Nope.

Cats.

edutcher said...

I thought it was because the demos want to return us to the Middle Ages.

All I need now is my serfboard.

Shouting Thomas said...

Or, to draw together today's posts in a common theme...

On a dark, cold winter night, there's nothing better than rolling up a blunt, watching Infestation on Animal Planet, eating a ham and cheese sandwich when you get the munchies and simultaneously web surfing on your iPad!

I really dug the Infestation episode on bats in the attic!

Shouting Thomas said...

Since I do live in Woodstock, the bread for my ham and cheese sandwich originates at our artisan bakery, Bread Alone, and I lather it up with a designer mustard purchased at the Cub Market in Bearsville!

kentuckyliz said...

Mobile homes are made with the same roach-attracting glues. They turn into roach infested boxes. That's why mobile homes are for poor people.

They have all those roaches in their environment and develop roach protein allergies, unbeknownst to them.

Then, desperate for some quick cash, they enter a roach eating contest. And die.

It's like a roach trap for humans.

John Evans said...

Bread Alone! I have the cookbook from them. It's simply the best book ever published about the art of baking bread.

Shouting Thomas said...

Bread Alone! I have the cookbook from them. It's simply the best book ever published about the art of baking bread.

For some reason, they stopped producing the whole wheat walnut loaf, which had been my favorite.

Their bakery in Boiceville is a magnet for the wandering seekers who turn up in Woodstock and need a part time job to pay the rent while they search for enlightenment.

Bread Alone is just the place for the Zen aspirant hoping to find that Right Livelihood!

Wince said...

Everyone knows the real cure for "Bedbugs" is "Termites" ...and Bob Dylan.

Mr. Tambourine Man

[On F-Troop] Agarn managed The Bedbugs (which were actually an L.A. band called The Factory which included Lowell George and Ritchie Hayward, later of Little Feat).

Then in order to convince Agarn back into the service, F.Troop had its own band, The Termites, that had some of F.Troop in hilarious wigs, compete with the Bedbugs for the Playbrave Club circuit.

At the end of the show, The Termites do "Mr. Tambourine Man! What a riot!

Lucius said...

You can take my print when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

McTriumph said...

Palladian
"The article wasn't about New York City."

The article is in the NYT, what city has a bedbug infestation problem?

Christy said...

Does Calvino's IF on a Winter's Night A Traveler lose all meaning in the world of Kindle?

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

I saw on Dirty Jobs that cockroaches love eloctromagnetic energy, so e-books would be an attractant.

Tully said...

Switching to e-texts is no solution for the libraries. Some publishers including and especially the largest ones make it near-impossible for libraries to afford e-texts by charging libraries four or five times as much for e-texts as they charge consumers, AND sharply limit the number of checkouts before the e-text self-destructs. Libraries can't afford them. And many publishers don't make e-texts of some new works available to libraries at all.

Not to mention that most large libraries have holdings of a million or more items for which comparable e-texts simply do not exist, nor if they did exist could the libraries afford to buy those items all over again in e-formats. When recession hits local government budgets, library budgets get hit harder than most other public services.

When I hear people talk about how libraries are going to be all-digital in the near future, I LMAO. Not anytime soon, they won't be. It's like the paperless office everyone was crowing about in the early '90s. Yes, technology meant every bit of information handled could be handled with less paper, but it also made information-handling so cheap that the amount of info being managed exploded even faster than the amount of paper for each bit reduced, and we ended up actually using MORE paper. We'll get there someday, but it won't be soon.

Tully said...

If you deduce from the above that big publishers are intentionally screwing libraries when it comes to e-texts by making them unaffordable for libraries so they can sell more themselves, you're 100% correct.

Kensington said...

"So, New York City has bedbug infestation because people read too much, instead of just being a very filthy place?"

Filth has nothing to do with bedbugs. They're not rats. They're not drawn by garbage; they're drawn by people (clean people and filthy people) exhaling in their sleep.