You no
longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
explained what God really meant
* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of a
monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the
Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a
success.
By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a
midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand
by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have
social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get
to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can
pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single
factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a
friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to
sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume
in a series!
* They are easy to slice and dice.
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