Why e-books are good for your health

Nostalgic for the good old days of curling up to reading Proust by the fireplace, the “sky-is-falling” opposition to the meteoric rise of e-books is in retreat. As we saw with the quaint devotees of the typewriter, the print newspaper and the landline telephone, there is, it seems, a grudging acceptance among the Chicken Little crowd that the days of physical bookstores are numbered. There are innumerable arguments on all sides of the e-book issue, and I will not debate their full merits here; like all new technologies, some publishers and authors have embraced e-books, others have decried them. In this essay I want to make one observation only: the rise of e-books is good for personal health.