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One of the best ways to spend your free time is to start reading a new book. Nowadays, people prefer spending each free minute browsing social media, watching memes and jokes, and doing nothing useful for their brains. However, it's a kind of muscle that should be trained regularly, and books help us do it imperceptibly. We get acquainted with the plot, dive into the interesting story, whereas our brain develops imagination, borrows new words and phrases, and improves speaking skills. College students who read a lot have almost no difficulties with academic writing and need to pay for essay in exceptional cases. The number of people using professional assistance is relatively high, and not all of them lack the writing skills to complete essays independently. The problem is with the educational system, destroying all the desire to obtain knowledge. The need to juggle studies with work, excel in all disciplines, and devote time to something besides college is what made academic help popular. Sometimes one finds it better to trust a homework to expert and devote an hour or two to reading a book. And this approach has the right to live.

Doctor Who and the smell of books: Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead

Doctor Who has been much on my mind lately, what with the new Matt Smith season starting up. (Next Saturday’s episode will be the one penned by master horror/fantasy wordsmith Neil Gaiman, and I’m quite looking forward to it.) But as I was discussing earlier episodes with a friend who is watching through them for the first time, I realized one of them touched on a TeleRead-related topic, and I didn’t mention it when it was originally on the air.

The episode in question is the season 4 two-parter “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead”, written by now-showrunner Stephen Moffat. It can be viewed streaming as part of the Doctor Who collection on Netflix, or in a low-resolution form via YouTube; there’s also a transcript here. You don’t really need any context to enjoy it beyond knowing that the Doctor is an eccentric time traveler who likes to travel with human companions. I’m going to spoil it a bit, so perhaps you should just take my word that it’s good and watch it first.

This isn’t really a full “review” of the episode, as I only touch on a couple of e-book-related plot elements, but suffice it to say it’s very creepy and atmospheric, with a number of interesting characters and ideas—well worth watching. But as for those plot elements…

“People never really stopped loving books,” the Doctor explains as he leads his companion Donna Noble out of the Tardis into a library. “51st century. By now you’ve got holovids, direct to brain downloads, fiction mist, but you need the smell. The smell of books, Donna. Deep breath.” I cannot now recall my exact feelings the first time I heard that line, but I would like to think I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or throw something at the screen. Even in Doctor Who do you find “the smell of books.”

And you also find the contention that printed books will never die. While Doctor Who’s chronology can be a bit suspect at times (another episode had 20th century TV shows being re-staged in the year 100,000 AD!), book-lovers can take solace in the fact that, in the Doctor Who universe, three thousand years from now there will be a library the size of a planet. (At the rate people publish books, there will probably have to be a library the size of a planet to hold them all, if they all come out in print!)

But it turns out that this is not necessarily a good thing (and here come those spoilers), because the books carried along with them a sort of infection or infestation. The trees that were pulped to make the books had been the home of sentient piranha-like living shadow creatures called the vashta nerada, that can strip all the flesh off a person’s skeleton in less than a second. And the Doctor is faced with having to protect a team of archaeologists from the threat and find out what happened to the thousands of staff and patrons who had previously inhabited the library, who the library computer rather ominously explains were “saved” even though there were “no survivors.”

So you could say that one subtext of the episode is that e-books are better because they are guaranteed 100% shadow-piranha-free. But perhaps that’s not the only e-book-related thing that’s worth pointing out about this episode. It turns out (another spoiler) that those staff and patrons had been “saved” by being digitized onto the library’s hard drive via the library’s transmat system—much the way print books can be “saved” by being digitized into e-books on hard drives.

I may be reaching a little here (given that the episode never explicitly makes this parallel), but it’s an amusing interpretation, isn’t it? And it does go right along with the way the episode subverts the love of print books even in an age of “fiction mist” by making those print books home to the monster of the week. (And who knows how many other giant libraries are similarly-infected?)

At any rate, if you want to explain to someone why e-books are better than print books, you can point to this episode and explain that e-books won’t eat the flesh off your bones. (They’ll just eat up all your free time, if you let them.)