If you hate ebooks, that loathing might attach to their dim screens, their wonky typography, their weird pagination, their unnerving ephemerality, or the prison house of a proprietary ecosystem. If you love ebooks, it might be because they are portable, and legible enough, and capable of delivering streams of words, fiction and nonfiction, into your eyes and brain with relative ease.

Listen to this celebration of CBC's battle of the books on Labour Day, Monday, Sept. 6 at 4 p.m. on CBC Radio, CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

Open a book and a brand new world

Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do.

No matter if it is Austen or Atwood, the Brontës or Booker winners, data shows men are reluctant to read women – and this has real world implications

Unread books are as powerful as the ones we read. An antilibrary is a private collection of unread books capturing the vastness of the unknown.

There’s more to words than meets the eye. Deepen your appreciation of literature through the art of slow, attentive reading

The silly idea that a fictional character’s statements reflect an author’s actual beliefs is spreading.

The stories we love best are filled with subtle (and not-so-subtle) lessons and perspectives. These quotes from 15 modern Canadian books offer unique insights into the lives we live.

Biblioracle columnist John Warner had a recent crisis of confidence surrounding his habit of hoarding books, but then some readers reminded him of some good reasons why we should keep even the ones we've already read.

Research from the 5B45 initiative showed the more words little children were exposed to, especially before they turn five-years-old, the better. Experts said reading not only builds their brains, but helps a child feel nurtured and loved.

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book where my enjoyment wasn’t tied to the euphoric sense of achievement I got from finishing it. This is not because I don’t love reading, or would rather watch television. No, it’s because of a little app on my phone called Goodreads.

In the age of Amazon and e-books, these bookstores have faced more challenges than ever, but many have been able to persevere and remain treasured parts of their communities

Report on reading habits of more than one million children also finds they read longer books, particularly during school closures

With smartphones, tablets and e-readers reaching mass adoption over the past few years, many have predicted that printed books would soon become a thing of the past. And while it’s true that people use their electronic devices to read, they still rely heavily on ink and paper when it comes to reading books.

“Books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her 1969 ode to why we read. For Kafka, a book was “the axe for the frozen sea inside us”; for Galileo, nothing less than a source of superhuman powers. “Without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his visionary 1930 meditation on “the magic of the book” and why we will always remain under its generous spell, no matter how the technologies of reading may change.

Scrolling may work for social media, but experts say that for school assignments, kids learn better if they slow down their reading.

It is right to rethink old literature. But does cancel culture amount to book burnings? Sooner or later, everybody gets cancelled, but I could not imagine why anybody would pick on Dr. Seuss, a childhood favorite of mine.

The Ars staff picks the novels we think would make compelling TV adaptations.

In many ways, improving the way we read is the number one skill that can change our lives for the better. This article explains how this is done.