ST:TNG The Royale

[beccaelizabeth]

Of the many and varied problems with an episode that is basically 'trapped in a holodeck on another planet' the one I keep getting stuck on is:
he has a book?
He has an actual paper book?
He's on an old sub light took off from Earth space ship and he has an actual paper book made of pages and weight?
and it's a bad book?
Why?

... so now instead of actually watching with more than one brain cell I'm constructing stories to explain the presence of this ridiculous relic.

... honestly, if I was going off into space, I'd take ebooks. And audio. And keep on uploading new ones for as long as I could stay in contact. The internet would still work from space, right? You'd just get 90s page load times.

Comments

[philippos42]

The writers hadn't thought of ebooks yet? Oh, wait, the Enterprise computer has all kinds of data. But the Enterprise is really really big. Moore's Law failure?

...massive system failure...

Oh, I'm way behind you. Yeah, it makes no sense.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods*
it's the little things that trip even good SF up.

[executrix]

I'm not so sure! I mean, if, in the real world, I gave you
a) A book printed in 1837 and
b) An 8 1/2" floppy disk of WordStar files, which one would you be able to read?

If there are a gazillion inhabited planets, some of them will have computer access for everybody, but some of them won't, so when I write Firefly fics, I always assume that out on the Rim, there are still paper books.

[beccaelizabeth]

That do make sense.
But in this specific context it's a guy who launched from the USA (which has all the books) and took this one specific actively bad book. For why?
It seems like its a choice with more story in it than the actual story I was watching.