The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though.  It seemed to me that electronic books are different from paper books, and have different virtues and failings.  Let’s think a little about what the book has gone through in years gone by.  This is interesting because the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution.

Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare leather by monks.  The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins.  The priests read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.

Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.  Martin Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God all on their own.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the printing press: 

[CHART:  LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]

* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated Bibles.  They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out the word of God

* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for Bibles.  A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man at the pulpit.  It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.

* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked.  There was no incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was so friggin’ hard on the eyes?

* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers.  Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text he wanted —­ and who knew how accurate that translation was?  Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead for centuries.

In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn’t get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn’t know if the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop mid-download.  I’m sure that many Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty.

What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that Luther Bibles kicked ass: 

[CHART:  WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]

* They were cheap and fast.  Loads of people could acquire them without having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the Church