Ars Technica would have you believe that the lack of facing pages in “e-book” gadgets like Amazon’s Kindle is the missing killer feature.

The solution to this problem is obvious and straightforward: design all e-book readers to display pairs of pages in the traditional, facing-page format in which books were designed to be read.

The author might as well predict the premature death of MP3 music because iTunes Music Store doesn’t include those nifty jewel cases or because the MP3s are missing the transparent ring of plastic at the center of CDs. Sure, no one would buy the spools of a VHS tape without the hard black plastic case, but that doesn’t mean that people didn’t switch to DVDs until DVDs came in the same type of black plastic case. And everyone will remember the prediction that digital music would fizzle because you couldn’t download the liner notes along with the music files.

This criticism of e-books confuses form and function, and betrays a lack of knowledge of book arts. The inner margin exists because you can’t read text in the binding. The outer margins protect the text from ordinary wear and tear on the paper. There’s a paragraph width that’s optimal for reading, around fifteen words — extremely narrow and extremely wide columns are equally difficult to read. If you want to have larger pages, your options are multiple columns or larger text, and multiple columns uses less paper. And binding sheets of paper together into facing pages is an efficient way of using both sides of each sheet of paper.

Protecting fragile paper, balancing a fixed text size and a fixed page size against the optimal paragraph width, and maximizing surface area while minimizing the amount of paper are all functional constraints on paper books. They are not factors in e-books like Kindle. (Although who knows what fancy new technologies, totally unlike Kindle, may bring.)

There are lots of excellent reasons why e-books don’t yet begin to compare to the traditional DTF. But the lack of facing pages, multi-column layout, and margins aren’t among them.