“knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them”

I didn’t say one should believe in two contradictory ideas, I meant it takes good, hard mental effort to avoid demonizing the other guy. That’s all I meant. Yet we all do it. We’re human.

Of course books are tangled up in such distasteful things as the desire for status, the desire to appear educated and erudite. The fetishization of bourgeois status is the oldest story going.

Marx said that the means of production defines the qualities of the object produced. A book is a fetishized object full of little printed letters of fetishized images because it was produced in a society which fetishizes fame and success, which fetishizes both the psychological satisfaction and the material success which can come to those rare lucky few who can put effective words together and earn fetishized dollars for it.

Commerce is fetish. Books for a Buck is an outlet which procures a hot date between individuals and the desired ideas/emotions conjured in the reader’s brain when she opens the pbook(or “turns on” the ebook–hubba hubba).

To suggest that the reader of ebooks is free of the fetishistic aspects of reading and of the book as a fetishized object is, in my subjective opinion, to look at books as primarily objects to be bought and sold. Meaning, it’s the argument of the salesman, which says that my product is better than that other product and here’s why. There’s nothing wrong with being a book salesman, but the rhetoric of marketing is very different than the rhetoric of intellectual debate.

I really don’t have anything against paper–I think it was a great technology that dominated for hundreds of years. Increasingly, its decorative and ‘statement’ value will outweigh its reading value.

Rob Preece

In the spirit of edifying contradictions and because this is a blog about books I offer another view embodied in a quote by George Orwell:

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again

There might be some dangers in holding “two contradictory ideas in your head at once” .

Why not try and come up with what could possibly be a good reason (or two) for preferring pBooks over eBooks and then dismantle THAT argument, which would strengthen your side of the argument. After all, the sign of a strong intellect is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at once.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

Slainte!
Kristina

You can get the 4 books used, as you could the book reader. A Palm m100 would cost you a few dollars.

In 4 years, how much will an eink reader be, anyone want to guess?

Hardbacks are around $55 here, trade annoying books $33. I can certainly get a newish Palm /something else device for four of those.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/comptext.htm

Also, the blog:
http://futureofthebook.com/storiestoc/hand

has an article about the possible connection between the hand turning the page of an actual book and the triggering of neurons which aid in retention of the material. They go on to compare turning a page and the repetitive motion of clicking and moving a mouse, which might possibly dull brain activity, or osmething, i forget wut i was sayin…