One Craig Mod (apparently his real name), a Tokyo-based book editor and graphic designer, has plenty of detailed and well-expressed opinions about “Books in the Age of the iPad.”

His first proclamation: E-books mean the impending end in print of “disposable books,” the “throwaway paperbacks” with ephemeral interest and limited artistic achievement. Or so Mod believes.

I disagree, natch.

To me, commercial ephemera is America’s greatest art form. And it comes close to being Japan’s greatest art form.

What Mod disdains as the “dregs of the publishing world” are the darlings of eBay, the stuff of occasional legend. They include everything in between magazines and trade paperbacks. They are the literature of their specific times and places.

They include the beautiful Dell “map back” mysteries, teen fan books, fashion and hair guides, comics collections, pretty much all science fiction/fantasy, decades of progressively-more-sexual romance novels, giveaway cookbooks, Scholastic Book Club titles sold in schools, “adult reading” novels with “good girl art” covers, and pretty much any reading matter issued since 1930 that is or ever was popular.

Mod is wrong about this point. But I believe he’s right about some of his other points.

Like when he mentions that publications designed for the iPad or other ebook readers could be categorized as either “formless content” (straight text) or “definite content” (material that relies upon text/image juxtaposition or other design elements).

And when he notes that iPad books don’t have to conform to print-centric “page layout” design metaphors.

And especially when he chides both Apple and Amazon for leaving out essential typographic tools from their ebook software platforms.