1 in 4 adults read no books last year

Originally Posted by Shorty

IF manga

NO!

Originally Posted by Vemp

If we consider comic books

NO!

Originally Posted by guyinrubbersuit

Do comics

NO!

Originally Posted by Gumby

If you count technical manuals

NO!

Originally Posted by TheDopefish

Harry Potter books

NO!

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Can we just go ahead and autoban anyone who freely and shamelessly admits to being an unread illiterate retard

I promise you we won't be losing anything valuable

There's nowhere I can't reach.

A graphic novel is a comic book with a BA in English. And they're fine, this isn't a LOL COMICS R FOR KIDZ tirade. For a long time Batman was taking up more of my drive space than my music directory. Comics are fine and good, and many of them contain great stories, but they're not books. The difference between a comic and an actual novel is vast in terms of the way they disseminate information. A "graphic novel" contains about as many actual words as half a chapter of a legitimate novel, and that's generously counting OOF!, POW!, BLAMMO!, and ZAP!

(well, ok, they might be "books" in some loose meaningless sense that they have covers, pages and bindings, but nobody's going to get credit for reading map books or stampbooks, are they?)

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by DragoonKain

But is someone who read a lot of books automatically smarter and more educated than someone who doesn't?

Bradylama has already explained why this should be considered a rhetorical question, but he veered off into the fringes of an awkward pretendetarian polemic like he usually does (and he used "Heinlein" and "masterpiece" in the same sentence ). So, for the sake of your short attention span:

Yes, you idiot. Yes.

Books are an extremely efficient method of conveying information, THEREFORE:

People who get information from books get that information highly efficiently, THEREFORE:

Those people can more easily absorb a like quantity of information as compared to those gleaning said information from other sources, THEREFORE:

You're just dumb as hell. The only information you'll get from TV is the information the station's billionaire owners want you to get. Enjoy that. Also: enjoy your delusion that writing as a method of communication survived for millenniums because it's LESS useful than conversation.

Fuckin' moon unit

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

No, no, agreeing to disagree is like when both people have a valid point but no one wants to budge.

THIS is something else, because it's basically us saying "dude, educate yourself, wtf" and your response taking the form of "BUT I NEEDS RITALINZ!"

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by DragoonKain

you aren't going to get information from a book that you get first hand from playing sports.

That's true, but it's also completely irrelevant to the argument. There is no substitute for direct experience, and that's true when it comes to anything. However, for most people direct experience is out of the question on a great many issues. Like, um... oh! Yes, you mention this HBO DOCUMENTARY about the Hiroshima bombing. Now, obviously I have no idea what it's like to live through an atomic bombing of my city, nor do I have any desire to find out firsthand. But I can satiate my curiosity via research. Now, I can watch a CABLE DOCUMENTARY with whatever "exclusive interviews" they can get out of the handful of decrepit oldsters left alive from that period, OR I can read this: Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima, a collection of the eyewitness accounts of child residents of Hiroshima a mere six years after the bombing. Which version of this information do you think is more robust?

(seriously guys, awesome (horrifying) book, get it if you can find it)

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Do you seriously think I was including fiction in my calculation, or are you just trolling me

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

A person that is best at learning through hearing isn't going to be getting a whole lot out of books.

'sup audio books

Seriously, while it's all fine to learn-through-doing (or through-hearing, through-seeing, etc), that isn't Kain's problem. He's perfectly capable of reading the sports page for information that he wants from it. He just doesn't read books, arbitrarily. I've never heard of learning-by-reading-newsprint-only. We could probably fool him into reading Crime and Punishment if we disguised it as the Sunday Times and sprinkled pictures of basketball players here and there.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by AlphaDeus

I'm not incredibly smart, but I manage to get through the day-to-day with no problem.

Hey, thanks for your eyewitness report that failure to be literate does not cause Instant Death Cancer, Ikky. Obviously a person can be very successful without reading anything more advanced than My Pet Goat; that doesn't make it an admirable trait.

Man, what a thing to break a lurk for. "HEY, I DON'T READ BOOKS, AND I DON'T THINK I'M DUMB".

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Summonmaster

Dan Brown, Harry Potter, Michael Moore

I am beginning to think you guys don't like reading books because the only books you've ever read are shitty ones. It's like your parents taking you to see your first movie, and it's Troll 2. The medium becomes suspect.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Domino

It is quite possibly the best book that I have ever read

Out of a field of what, 3?

Christ, the both of you. The King/Straub books aren't bad for what they are, but be serious. :/

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.