A friend recently purchased a book as a gift for me through Amazon, and I have to report that the thing is defective.

First of all, when I tap the right edge of the page, it doesn’t turn. To make matters worse, when I used the emergency manual page advancement feature, I got–you’ll never believe this–a PAPER CUT! These guys are risking a serious product liability lawsuit!

Second, there’s a serious legibility problem under low levels of illumination. When I take this book into a dark room, I can’t make out the writing! How can anyone read a book that refuses to illuminate itself? And speaking of legibility, I can’t figure out how to adjust the font size, line spacing, and margins; I’m forced to adjust my vision to the book, instead of the other way round!

Finally, and I know this is a bit arcane and nerdish, but the TARDIS feature is broken too. I noticed this when I set the book down next to my tablet with its various ebook readers, and saw that the book is much thicker–apparently its size scales to reflect the volume of its content, an observation confirmed when I dug some other books out of the closet and laid them out next to the tablet and the new book. It was uncanny to see how thickness corresponded exactly to page count, making due allowance for the varying composition and quality of the storage substrate, the “paper” pages. While the tablet, with its intact TARDIS transdimensionality field, maintains its svelte profile no matter how many hundreds of virtual books it contains.

I know something is wrong here, yet there’s something hauntingly familiar about this particular suite of problems. Has anybody else encountered this kind of problem with books lately?