I have a friend who travels a lot on business. When I asked her if she wanted me to send ebook versions of my novels, she responded with a loving and detailed description of her process for choosing what to read on a plane. It involves walking into the used bookstore in her local airport, mulling over the used book bin, the smell, the feel of the paper… I think it’s a religious experience for her.

Others of my friends cite similar reasons for eschewing ebooks: they love the tactile and olfactory experience associated with paper.

Me, I prefer ebooks. Specifically, on the ereader apps on my smartphone.

Why? Well, first off, I have arthritis in my hands. The average weight of a hardback book is almost 2 pounds, and that of a paperback just over 1 pound. My smartphone weighs less than 5 ounces. It’s painful to hold a hardback open, uncomfortable to hold a paperback, but completely painless to hold my phone. It’s a no-brainer which I’ll choose, given the choice.

Second, they’re cheaper, so I can buy more of them.

Third, they don’t weigh anything, so I can carry around hundreds of them and decide on the spur of the moment what I want to read on the plane.

But — there’s always a but — there’s also the fact that I simply don’t care what medium the words come to me in, as long as I get to read them. I forget where I am (unless pain keeps bringing me back — see point the first above), I forget who I am, and anything you say to me while I’m reading a novel can and will be immediately forgotten, even if my lips carry on some kind of conversation with you (which I also won’t remember). If my eyes don’t leave the page, it doesn’t make it into long-term memory.

So I read a statement a little while ago to the effect that sometimes it’s just cozier to curl up with a print book. Elsewhere, I’ve read numerous sanctimonious pontifications on the superiority of print for the Quintessential Reading Experience. And that saddened me, because Hello. Arthritis. Am I missing out on something?

I thought back to the days before I developed arthritis, when there were no ebooks, and I’d curl up somewhere with the remains of a dead tree. And I remembered that I really didn’t care then, either, what the paper smelled like or how it felt in my hands. Today, I curl up with the processed remains of dead dinosaurs wrapped around a framework of light metal, and I don’t miss books made of paper. I especially don’t miss the stabbing pain of my arthritis getting inflamed by the weight of them.

If you ask me (and I know you didn’t), I don’t think the debate really has anything to do with the medium on which the words are printed. What it actually has to do with, I’ll leave you to decide, gentle reader.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we shall hold print books to be superior.
On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, we shall hold ebooks to be superior.
And on Sunday, we shall simply rest.

Happy Sunday!