The “must-have” gadget this Christmas season is clearly the e-reader. The Amazon Kindle appears to be flying off the shelves, and the Barnes and Noble Nook is back-ordered due to high demand. As a self-professed bibliophile, I have followed the development of e-books with great interest, and even with some concern. At first, my Luddite tendencies prevailed and I thought e-readers were a silly fad, but then for a while my geek side won out and I embraced the concept wholeheartedly. But then I began to question some of the outlandish statements made on their behalf, especially the belief that they will completely replace paper-bound books in the near future. This is not going to happen.

The reason I don’t think e-readers will replace paper-bound books isn’t simply nostalgia; it is an opinion based on technology. And simply put, the paper-bound book is a vastly superior technology compared to the current e-readers. The e-reader is better at some specific tasks, but in most ways, the paper-bound book still offers the best way to read books.

Here are a few ways in which the paper-bound book is superior to the e-reader:

1) A common, lasting format. Currently, the e-reader market is in the classic “Beta vs. VHS” stage. Getting a book on a Kindle doesn’t mean that you could read it on a Nook. There is no clear-cut winner yet in the format wars, so the reader you get now may not be able to read any e-books in five or ten years. Even if the manufacturers of e-readers would agree on a common format, you still must possess an e-reader of some kind to read an e-book. Anyone can read a paper-bound book, however.

2) Easier to share. The Nook has a unique feature that allows you to “lend” your e-books to another e-reader for 14 days (and then, for some inexplicable reason, you can’t re-loan it to them). This is considered advanced in the e-reader field, but it is clearly far inferior to the paper-bound book world, where you can lend your books to anyone you want (they don’t need a compatible e-reader or any device, for that matter) and for as long as you want.

3) More resistance to damage. Ever thought about reading a book in the bath? Good luck if you have an e-reader. Also, if you run over a Kindle with your car, you have to purchase a whole new Kindle and re-download all your books. Running over a book with your car usually just puts a tire-mark on it, especially if it is a hard-back.

4) Longer-lasting. A paper-bound book can outlast the lifespan of a human being. The typical lifespan of a high-tech device is about 2-5 years. Once you are on the e-book track, you will need to constantly keep upgrading over the course of your life to maintain that lifestyle.

5) True ownership. If you buy a book, you own it. Forever. When you buy an e-book, you are just licensing the text from Amazon or the publisher or whoever truly owns the book. If they want, they can take away your e-book for any reason or no reason (which has already happened once with the Kindle).

6) Superior reading experience. This is not as subjective as it sounds. When you read a paper-bound book, you are using more than your sense of sight. You are also using your sense of touch. You know just by holding the book how far along you are – there is no need to check the page indicator at the bottom of a screen. Furthermore, if you need to go back a few pages to remember who a character is or review an important point made by the author, flipping back a few pages while skimming the text is quite easy – at least in comparison to doing the same on an e-reader. Studies have shown that paper allows people to process text better than text on a screen.

7) More focused reading. When you are reading a paper-bound book, there is nothing else you can do with that book. Your entire attention is focused on the text and on nothing else. With an e-reader, you can quickly change to another book or even on some readers decide to browse the web. (Some have noticed that this lack of focus with screen reading is changing how we think). The single-mindedness of the paper-bound book has been called a disadvantage by some, but it is clearly an advantage if you really want to engage the text of the book. Both this point and #6 above leads to a “deeper” reading experience: you can engage the text more closely and in a more focused manner than you can in an e-reader.

This is not to say that the e-reader is worthless; on the contrary, it has many positive features that make it useful for certain types of reading. For example, I often will print out long PDF’s I find online so that I can read them away from my computer. This has lead to piles of paper crammed throughout my office. I can see the benefit of just loading these on an e-reader. The same thing could be said for magazines – do we really need a bunch of paper magazines sitting around the house? Also, I can see much benefit to an e-reader for college students. Instead of lugging around 50 lbs of books that cost north of $500 – books that will probably never been read again by that student – just putting it all on an e-reader can be quite helpful.

But these are specific cases and don’t encompass the whole reading experience. At least for a while, the most “high-tech” way to read a book is the old-fashioned way: paper-bound books.

This is pretty awesome:

A couple of completely useless, but fun, videos for your hump day:

H/t: Justine

H/t: Aggie Catholics

According to a Vatican official, belief in aliens is not necessarily against the Catholic Faith:

Father Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, said this week there is no opposition between belief in the existence of aliens and at the same time belief in God. This position, he reminded, was held by Father Angelo Secchi, the 18th century Jesuit astronomer and director of the Observatory of the Roman College—today the Pontifical Gregorian University.

In an interview with L’Osservatore Romano, Father Funes explained that Father Secchi was the first scientist to classify the “stars according to their spectrum” and that the existence of aliens “could not be excluded a priori.”

Boy is this going to open up some evangelization opportunities, along with some unique challenges. But if you thought St. Francis Xavier had a hard time as a missionary to Asia, imagine how difficult it will be to convert Klingons (although they probably would appreciate our veneration of the martyrs). At least this site will make the job a bit easier.

This year I am going to be teaching one of my children a history of the Church through the lives of the saints. I’m picking two or three saints from each century since the Church was founded to represent how men and women throughout the years have best followed Christ in their time and culture. I have found this Wikipedia page of extreme help. It lists all the saints in chronological order, divided by century.

A few (admittedly trivial) statistics I gathered:

• First Saint to die: Joseph (this does not include saints who died before Christ was born, such as Anne and Joachim)
• Saint most recently born: St. Gianna Beretta Molla (1922)
• Saint who most recently died: St. Josemaria Escriva (1975)
• Century with the most saints: 4th century (531!)
• Century with the least saints: 15th century (only 30)

I find it interesting that the 15th century has the least number of canonized saints, for the division of Western Christendom immediately followed it in the 16th century. Would so many souls have decided to leave the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation if they had more examples of saints living within the Church during the 15th century?

The 4th century gets the distinction as the “most holy” century with 531 canonized saints. Two distinctive events of that century produced this large number of saints: the persecution of Diocletian at the beginning of the century led to numerous martyr-saints, and the later legalization of Christianity brought internal debates into the open, creating a need for great theologians like Athanasius, Basil and Gregory Nazianzen to defend the faith against powerful heresies.

For the really geeky out there (like me), here is a chart showing the number of canonized saints by century:

My own favorite “saint centuries” are the 1st (of course), 4th, 13th (can’t beat Francis, Clare, Dominic and Thomas Aquinas), and 20th. If you have a favorite “saint century,” feel free to leave it in the comments.

Update: A number of people have commented on the fact that these numbers don’t really reflect the exact number of saints through the centuries (either due to Wikipedia’s unreliability or the anonymity of many saints or all the machinations that are involved in getting someone officially canonized). This is true. The above information is not intended to be scholarly, but instead just a fun look at canonized saints through the ages. We can be very thankful that heaven is full of a large number of saints unknown to us who constantly intercede on our behalf.

If you want to listen to my interview on the Son Rise Morning Show from this morning, you can hear it online at:

September 14th Son Rise Radio Show Archive

You need to let the entire file load and then cue the audio almost to the end of the file to catch my segment. (The show airs from 6am to 9am and I was on at 8:40am.)

To see the article referenced in the interview, click here.

Episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” would often show Captain Picard sitting in his office reading from an actual book – not a tablet or computer screen, but a real paper book. I think the writers of the series wanted to show Picard as an intellectual and deep thinker, and they knew having him just read from a tablet device would not give off that impression. But they knew that a book would surely show that the good Captain had a great mind.

I thought of that when I read this quote:

There are modes of learning and thinking that at the moment are only available from actual books. There is a kind of deep-dive, meditative reading that’s almost impossible to do on a screen. Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas.

- William Powers, author of a paper published at Harvard called “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal” (source)

I find in my own experience that this statement rings very true. When I try to read something on a screen, I find myself more often than not “grazing,” not reading. My mind cannot focus as deeply on screen text and I usually cannot stay with the material very long. Yet when I read an actual (paper) book, I am much more able to do the “deep-dive” reading that Powers describes. This is why if I find something on the Internet that I really want to digest, I print it out.

This brings up an interesting question that all Christians should contemplate: how will this affect our biblical literacy? The Bible is the most important text we as Christians have in our possession, and it contains the story of God’s unbelievable love for His people. Yet the Bible is a challenging text to read – it consists of widely varying genres from quite diverse cultures (diverse from our own and even at times from each other). There is no question that the Bible requires the “deep-dive, meditative reading” that Powers says is “almost impossible to do on a screen.” So what does this mean? If we as a society transform into an entirely screen-based reading society, will our knowledge of the Scriptures begin to fade? Will we be able to delve deeply into the Word of God? Powers says that only paper allows a reader to be able to “be by themselves with the author’s ideas.” What happens when the author is God?

One could argue that our inability to do deep reading on the screen is simply due to it being a new media, and that future generations will be able to read meditatively even from a screen, as that will be the only reading that they will know. But what if that is not the case? What if the human mind simply cannot process words from a screen as well as it processes words on paper?

Can the Word become flesh in pixel form?

Picture this scene: you are discussing a topic with a fundamentalist, and you stop the conversation, pull out your iPhone and say, “Wait, let me find out what the Pope wants me to think about this.” It will be sure to blow the fundies’ mind and establish you as a true über-Catholic.

Is this some futuristic fantasy I’m talking about? No! It is about to become reality!

On May 24th, World Communications Day, the Pope (well, actually an office at the Vatican) will be launching iPhone and Facebook apps. Now you can get your papal dope straight from the source while getting your geek on.

Last week I posted on the positives and negatives of e-books. Well, I think I’ve now been completely convinced of their usefulness:

I’m going out to my local Radio Shack to buy one today!

H/t: Justine

Every day I pray the Angelus with my family; it is one of the best parts of my day. Sometimes, however, our schedules are such that I cannot pray with them.

Recently I set up Speech Recognition on my MacBook to respond to voice commands such as “Save this document”, “Open my browser” and “Get my mail.” It is pretty cool and definitely brings out the inner Geek in me.

How are these two things related? Watch this video to find out:

In line with what I wrote earlier about the need to escape the “tyranny of time,” the Catholic Sentinel has a beautiful story about two men – a Silicon Valley executive and an electrial engineer – who left their successful careers to become Carmelite friars. An excerpt:

Brother Kissner, to be called Brother Mark of of the Most Precious Blood, was a 30-year-old electrical engineer working in San Diego when he joined his parish’s group for young adults. He learned more about his faith and dated, hoping to be married and raise a family.

“Over time, through prayer and study, I grew more and more in love with Jesus Christ and His Church,” Brother Kissner writes in an e-mail interview. “I had also been influenced by several holy religious priests and nuns over those years. At some point during this period of deepening my faith, the idea of becoming a religious priest entered my mind.”

He struggled with the idea for years, because his vision for himself had always been as a husband and a father. But the more he tried to put the idea of religious life out of his mind, the worse he felt. He describes his decision to truly consider the life as “a surrender” that yielded much peace.

“God made the path to enter the Carmelites fairly easy after that,” writes Brother Kissner, a 42-year-old native of Dayton, Ohio and a graduate of Purdue University.

Men such as Brother Kissner and Brother Silva are the backbone of the Church – let’s pray that God raises up more men and women willing to give up the rat race for a life of prayer.