Motherboard

A stack of some highly unreadable “Google books” at the Google-sponsored National Book Awards party on Wednesday.

Having Google sponsor your big book party might feel a bit like having MTV sponsor your underground punk show, or the coal industry sponsor your climate change campaign, or a big computer maker sponsor your feisty, ragtag technology site. Sure, everyone’s doing it these days, but Google showed up at the National Book Awards after-party the other night on Wall Street looking awfully suspect. He wore borrowed tweed and spoke in accents, like some celebrity-turned-literary star: widely adored but also despised, even feared, for what he might do to this precious, fragile world of letters.

But say what you will about our soon-to-be library, librarian, bookstore, publisher and collective consciousness (and whatever you say will be stored forever on a server). This company has a real capacity for some famous literary devices, like metaphor and foreshadowing.

Alongside hundreds of free colorful notebooks and signs near the open bar plastered in Google’s logo, the company decorated the furniture with lots of stacks of books. Fake, dead books.

When she tired of roaming between the whisky-soaked conversations of nervous black-tied editors and James Franco, a friend tried to pick up one of the books. But she got the whole stack. Not only had the books been thickly painted in the company’s rainbow of colors, they’d been screwed and glued together to prevent them from ever being read, much less opened again. Someone commented that they still smelled like spray paint.

The targets of Google’s literary vandalism have already been scanned by the Google monster. One stack — none of them available for full reading on Google yet — contained Heart of the West by Penelope Williamson, Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes, Iceman by Chris Lynch, and Jacob Koppel Javits’ Order of Battle — another not so subtle hint that print is sinking like the Lusitania.

Sorry, did we mention that the whole thing was held at a lavish restaurant — on Wall Street?

We get it Google. We’re not gonna fight you. You can do whatever you want, including dropping ominous hints at our book parties, your Silicon Valley versions of the dead fish wrapped in a newspaper.

(A metaphorical newspaper of course, cuz they’re dead too.)