Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

After all of the talk — originating most recently from Margaret Atwood while on a panel at the London Book Fair — about how print books are superior to electronic books because you can’t read electronic books in a bathtub, Chris Steib recently set out to see if this was really true. How did he do this? Well, he performed an experiment where he compared the two experiences “by pitting my new Sony eReader against a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in the environment Ms. Atwood so boldly claims is the true domain of paper — NOT digital — books.” The result is an entertaining and quasi-scientific experiment, all of which is documented in photographs which are pretty damn funny. Along the way Steib keeps score, rating each reading experience on its bathtub virtues; the winner may surprise you…

The Ultimate eBook Experiment: Reading in the Bathtub