#8. You Can’t Hide a Gun in a Kindle
“Well, you can’t. I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can argue about. If you can put a gun in an e-reader, go on and take a photo and let’s see it”
#7. You Need Physical Books for Physical Tasks
“Sure, there are other tools that can do these things better, but that requires you to be prepared and know you need them ahead of time. For stupid people and poor planners like me, it’s good to have the books sitting around, in their natural home in the living room, ready for anything. Like the sudden appearance of a spider, or an unexpected flower-pressing emergency”
#6. No More Flipbooks and Mustaches in Textbooks
“If our society moves to e-books, textbooks will probably go electronic as well, which is, on the one hand, great, because maybe college students will finally stop being constantly ripped off on textbooks. On the other hand, it may be the end of a proud tradition of drawing mustaches and Satan horns on important historical figures”
#5. It May Change the Perception of the Necronomicon and Other Mystical Books
“Will people stop using them in movies? Will they continue to use them in movies as archaic artifacts that the audience will increasingly struggle to understand? “Why is he trying to grab that biting leather thing off the pedestal?” they might ask. “They said he was supposed to get a book, why didn’t he just download it back at the castle? Does the castle not get wireless?” “
#4. Book Burnings Will Have Less Visual Impact
“This symbolism is kind of lost when burning an e-reader, which is really just a device for displaying the information, whose original copy is obviously stored somewhere else. And considering that one e-reader can store a massive collection of text, burning a family’s entire collection would probably make a sad little bonfire requiring about two newspaper pages and a stick of wood. Sure, you’ve cut off their access to the offending information, but the bigger point was to make a show of how powerful you are in being able to do so and how complete and massive the erasure of their identity is. You want them to be scared of you, and now they just kind of feel sorry for you”
#3. How Will People Open Secret Passageways?
“Seriously, if you can’t pull a cleverly titled book out of a bookcase to get it to swing open, what else are you going to do? You have to put an artifact in a slot or push a really obvious wooden carving every time? Boy, that is going to get old fast”
#2. You Can’t Separate Bathroom Books from Outside Books
“So yeah, no matter how careful you yourself are, for the general population, one reading device traveling constantly between the bathroom and the outside world means that a small-town stardom-seeking poo bacterium has that many more opportunities to make its big break”
#1. People Will Really Have to Think Before Handing Out Fliers and Religious Pamphlets
“Right now, with paper being as cheap as it is, they will carelessly toss these fliers and tracts and pamphlets at you as if it were confetti. If they were handing you this information on a $100 e-reader, however, I think these struggling alt-rock bands and mass proselytizers might spend a little more time considering exactly how much value the recipient is likely to place on this information”
