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

* They were in languages that non-priests could read. 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. This is where the Mac
evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
it. We all want to popular