As an intern at Melville House Publishing, I get to do some pretty cool stuff. Sure, I have to send quite a bit of books in the mail, but most of my time is spent doing research for various in-house projects. Sometimes this means looking through pages of early 20th century art; at others it means looking for opera singers willing to sing to promote a book. But most of the time, for me at least, it means reading and looking for material to support Illuminations for Melville House’s Hybrid Book series. Take my word for it, this is a pretty cool job for a book person—and trust me, I wasn’t paid to write that.

All jokes aside, I get to do good research here. The other day I had to do some desktop reading on Google Play, unfortunately, as the text could be found nowhere else on the web. I was hoping to find some material for the Illuminations for an upcoming novella. Though I found interesting text, the words were not what kept me clicking from page to page—almost every page was splattered in gray stains. Yes, stains on the ebook.

Part of what makes reading a physical copy of a book endearing is that we tend to beat them up as we work our way through them. Dog ears, little tears, sun faded covers, and, of course, coffee stains (or grease stains for those of us who prefer pizza with our books). At first a stain on the page burns our book-loving souls, and we curse ourselves. But the psychological scars left by these stains remind us of where we were and what we were doing/drinking when our favorite protagonist defeated their nemesis or finally captured the heart of the one they love.

The robots geniuses at Google must have caught on to the priceless relationship between reader and stained page. Intrigued by the stains on the first book I read on Google Play, I decided to take a look at some others. Sure enough, apocryphal gray stains could be found on the pages of almost every other free novel I downloaded. Some may say that these stains are not intentional.

To those people, I would say, “stains tend not to be.” They might support this claim by highlighting the fact that the novels I looked through are in the public domain and scanned into Google Play’s database, and that the stains I’m seeing are ancient ink stains. But come on. If Project Gutenberg can afford to digitize their public domain texts, Google can get some interns on typing up clean copies.

The stains are not innocent; they’re simply the latest in a series of ploys by the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple to eradicate the physical book market. But one thing that compulsively clean robots geniuses don’t understand is that only a spur-of-the-moment, personally caused stain will bring a reader closer to their book. Sorry, super-villain corporations… If my Grandma spills coffee on her Kindle, it will break. Try all you want to add virtual personality to your ebooks, but those attempts will never make you more human authentic.