If I were ever going to publish a writing advice book, it would probably be something to stem the deluge of wannabe creative writers, like this:
Monthly Archives: August 2015
I rant about paper fetishism a lot. This weird cult of the paper book habitually twists research into pseudoscience to slander ebooks as sleep-stealers, brain-numbers, and (ironically) out of fashion. It’s exhausting confronting these ignorant primitivists, particularly because I actually prefer paper books to ebooks. But I do not prefer them enough to lie or corrupt science in order to evangelize my preference as a universal virtue.
Paper fetishists, on the other hand, simply cannot stop lying about ebooks. Their obsessively dishonest denigration of ebooks is, to be honest, a little creepy. Of all the thinly veiled hate movements out there, this one has to be the inexplicably virulent. It’s just a book format, people.
So let’s talk about the latest anti-ebook polemic at Mic, which persists in ignorantly calling paper codices “actual books” in complete misunderstanding of the many formats books have gone through over the ages. Jon Levine continues the dumbing down of our discourse of book format by misrepresenting research to favor the dogma of paper fetishists.
Levine drags us through three categories of bullshit supposedly demonstrating the superiority of reading paper books: memory, comprehension, and empathy.
Thank you, Rick Perry.
hooker (Fr. houcre, Sp. urca): a Dutch vessel of fifty to 300 tons, single- or double-masted, with a fluyt-shaped hull. Sometimes referred to a three-mast vessel.
– The Sea Rover’s Practice : Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630-1730 by Benerson Little