Book (noun): Little monster animal that feeds on human time

The printed book, commonly referred to as “book”, is a little winged animal that feeds on human time. Their typical height is roughly around 20cm with a wingspan of about 30cm. However, individuals below 1cm or above 1.5m in height have been spotted.

Books usually live and hunt together in groups of varying sizes and are happy to move to a different group several times in their lives. Usually, they sleep cuddled together on their shelves, but after a successful hunt, a book may be happy to fall asleep just anywhere.

When hunting, the book chooses a vulnerable, unsuspecting victim and paralyses it with its venomous bite, often for hours at a time. It will then drag its victim to a quiet place to feed in peace. A book will often repeatedly feed on the same victim before moving on to the next one.
It is believed that sleeping hours are a special delicacy for books, for which they’ll risk almost anything.

Young books live in big schools, called book shops, but also older books have a tendency to herd together in large groups, called libraries, to increase their hunting success.

Subspecies and related species

Next to the printed book exists the e-book, a rather new subspecies of the book. The e-book lives in huge colonies, called an e-book reader, which can house several thousand individuals, and often the whole colony feeds on just one or two victims.

Another related species is the so called blog post. Blog posts live in family groups, known as blogs, spread far across the internet. These animals are a lot smaller than books, so each individual needs a lot less human time to survive, however there is evidence that the different blogs communicate and inform each other of potential victims in the vicinity. This makes the blog post very dangerous to humans, because a victim can lose a lot of time when attacked by several blogs at the same time.

While the numbers of the printed book are in decline and it may soon become an endangered species, both the e-book and the blog post strive and increase their numbers continually.

Books as pets
Books can be domesticated, however, many book owners are unaware of their vicious and parasitic nature. Breeding books is a very complicated and laborious endeavour and many people fail doing it. Blog posts, on the other hand, are happy to reproduce even in captivity.

Scientific classification
Family: Reading material
Species: Book
Subspecies: Printed Book, Ebook

Which books feed on you these days?