It's finally coming to end. These are the last years of making out with your significant other between the stacks. No longer will you have games of sardines and hide-and-go-seek with your friends around those unexplored levels. No longer will you walk up to the top floor and find yourself on the mezzanine, mysteriously two floors above Level 2. The library will soon fade miserably into history like the dinosaurs. Farewell, Farber.You ask, what meanies would take away the fun of using card catalogs, flickering the lights between the stacks on and off and researching incredibly specific and trivial topics? It is the same group of people that ruthlessly takes over smaller powers, the group that reaches too boldly for the idealistic, and the one that makes up verbs that previously didn't exist. No, it is not the government, but Google. Those Silicon Valley radicals want to digitize libraries.

Apparently, being the number one search engine around isn't good enough for Google. The good-looking, strong, wealthy company just has to pick on the nerdy, four-eyed, little library. Ben Franklin must be rolling in his grave.

On Dec. 14, Google announced a deal that will allow the search engine to start digitizing eight million books from a select number of libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at both the University of Michigan and Oxford University.

If Google has its way, the future will be a world without libraries, solely reliant on documents placed online. It will certainly be convenient to remember a line from a book, type it in a search engine, and have the text of a digitized book on your computer screen in seconds.

Google declared that its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But we all know the end goal of these maniacs: destroying the one remaining sanctuary from our annoying roommates.

The library is truly a safe haven that keeps us away from that distracting AOL Instant Messenger, incessant residence-hall chatter and ringing cell phones. Well, perhaps it is not always a refuge from these interruptions. Sometimes sections of Farber seem louder than a quickly-broken-up Saturday-night party.

Of course, when e-libraries eventually take over, any reference assistance will be conducted over the phone. Instead of bearing the cold to reach the library, we will be able to sit in our warm, cozy dorm rooms. But instead of getting quick directions and helpful hints from kind, caring research librarians, Google will probably mimic Dell and employ tech support professionals outsourced from India.

After 30 minutes on hold you will finally have your concern addressed by an impersonal support person from across the globe.

There are other consequences of digitalizing books. What will happen to the bookstore? With books online, there will be no need to go through the process of buying 20 books, returning them all, and then buying 20 entirely new books during the shopping period.

On a personal note, if there were no libraries, I would not have been born. My parents first met between the stacks in a library in Philadelphia, where my mom was looking for an art history book. My dad had been looking for the biology section for over an hour and was completely lost.

If it weren't for his cluelessness, and libraries, I would not have been conceived. And there are millions out there like me, ready and willing to fight Google. We have a lot of heavy hardcover books, and we are not afraid to throw them.