Why you shouldn't buy an e-book reader

Hot on the heels of the success of the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble announced the impeding release of a competing e-book machine called the Nook. Despite the terminally retarded name (couldn't they have named it FantastoBook or something? Grow a fucking pair, gadget marketers!) it actually sounds pretty cool.

There's still no way in hell I'd buy one, though. Consider this: the major social benefit to book reading in our modern age is the ability to lord it over people who either (a) don't read or (b) spend most of their time reading bullshit young adult fiction. The corollary to this is the ability to arrive at a rough estimation of a person's intellect by the size and content of their bookshelf or show off your brilliance through the size and content of your own. That's why I have a handful of antiquated books on psychotherapy that I didn't pay for and have no intention of reading, yet keep in plain view in my apartment. The whole point of books in this day and age is that they're retrograde and inefficient. A healthy book collection is the perfect complement to your useless liberal arts degree.

The e-book reader fucks all that up. First off, you can't tell what other people are reading on it and nobody can tell what you're reading, effectively ending the time-honored social ritual of reading a book in public to make yourself look smarter. Also lost is the ability to sneer at another person for reading Deepak Chopra or one of those "inspirational" books where a retired pro-football coach tortures personal anecdotes into dubious metaphors for achieving success in business. Worse, the Kindle/Nook ruins the convenient more books = smarter person shorthand by being the same size whether you have one book or a couple thousand. Consider: despite the fact that everyone now owns an iPod or comparable MP3 player, all of which can hold a couple thousand songs at a minimum, the average number of songs kept on such devices is somewhere in the 300s. All most people do is copy the 15 or so greatest-hits albums they own over to their MP3 player and call it a day. Similarly, I bet most people who get an e-book reader once the market expands more mainstream will probably buy the Twilight books and maybe one or two other things and just read those over and over again, and no one will ever be the wiser.

In conclusion, buying an e-book reader forfeits a great deal of the educated American's established avenues of pretentiousness. With the economy being the way it is today, that's a price we can't afford to pay. It's bad enough that HBO had to make it to where we can't look down on people for enjoying television anymore. Now we're gonna turn reading books into the functional equivalent of browsing sports scores on a BlackBerry?