I value books for their content, not their format. However … I tried e-books and just could not stick with them.

On the other hand … I tried e-books on my cell phone, not an e-reader, and I still sell e-books on Kindle and Nook.

So where does that leave me on the recent news that sales of e-books and readers are plateauing while paper codex sales are making gains?

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I much prefer paper codices to e-books, for a variety of reasons. (None of which have to do with smell, sorry.)

I certainly recognize the virtues of e-books, their ease of publication, their economy, their portability. And, looking at the walls of my apartment where over 70 percent of the perimeter is taken up by book-cases, I certainly appreciate the space considerations.

But, I still prefer paper books. And this is why it is so frustrating to watch paper fetishists work themselves into a lather coming up with dishonest and irrational arguments bolstering the superiority of the codex. It’s like being a Christian faced with Westboro Baptist extremism, or an environmentally conscious person faced with Greenpeace’s adolescent antics.

For example, it’s more than a little annoying when a book-lover like me reads anecdotal fluff like this passed off as “research”: Continue reading →

Remember a couple of weeks ago when codex fetishists were exuberant about a study they thought showed that reading e-books keeps you up at night?

Except that the study really showed no such thing?

Well, they’re at it again. Continue reading →

You may have heard about the recent study “proving” that reading e-books will destroy your sleep cycle.

Well, you didn’t really, because that’s not at all what the study shows, if it in fact shows anything. What you did hear was yet another round of mindless whooping among the prejudiced, paper-loving Luddites who don’t care how much pseudoscience and misinformation they have to spread in their crusade against e-books.

To show you what I mean, below the jump are three stories about the study, including details that show that it’s not completely the fault of science journalists. The researchers themselves are corrupting science with false dilemmas, false attribution of cause, and laughably poor methodology.

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Watching the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, I started to notice strange echoes between this hard-boiled classic and Dan Brown’s run-away best-seller (arguably the best-selling book of all time) The Da Vinci Code.

So, on a lark, I decided to make a bullet list of the comparisons. Continue reading →

I know. Putting the words “nuance” and “rape” in the same headline is dangerous. I’m probably stepping in a hornet’s nest. But, I have been pretty harsh toward Shia LaBeouf as an artist. I’ve ridiculed his reaction to being called out on plagiarism, I’ve tied him to cultural forces threatening to destroy art and civilization, and … yes … I’ve even dragged the discussion to argumentum ad Nazium.

So, I feel I owe him some decent human perspective. I need to say something about his claim that a woman raped him during his #IAMSORRY exhibit.

I wrote up a 3400-word essay about the subject. But, to avoid TL;DR, I pared it down to four bullet points: Continue reading →