ELECTRONIC reading devices are not as good as real books for making you look clever, it was claimed last night.
E-readers like Kindle are rapidly replacing traditional books, but unlike a shelf full of intimidating hardbacks about poetry, string theory and Russian actors who committed suicide, they can never make you look more intelligent than you really are.
Publisher Tom Logan said: “Compared to electronic devices, books have a physicality that is magical and timeless. Plus they can get you blow jobs.
“You go to a coffee shop with a Kindle, intellectual girls don’t know whether you’re reading Foucault’s Pendulum or playing Tetris.
“Tasteful books, especially big thick ones without pictures in, are vital indicators of your brainy sexiness.
“You don’t even have to read them, just leave them strewn around the public areas of your house in a seemingly haphazard fashion. It’s like having A Levels, but without doing all the essays and shit.”
The popularity of electronic reading also threatens the future of high street book shops full of wistful looking young women hoping to strike up a conversation with a sexy stranger who is terribly fond of Balzac.
Logan added: “And without bookshops, pale socially-awkward English Literature graduates will have to work in PR or public sanitation.
“Unable to write florid ‘staff reviews’ of Alan Moore comics and obscure paperbacks about Japanese sailors with two penises they would be forced to retreat from society altogether, possibly to create a diabolical and short-lived indie music sub-genre.
“Send your Kindle back to Amazon in a million tiny pieces.”