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All right, I'll confess: I have read an ebook. On my Nook.
Yes, you may now laugh, you who have already wizarded your way through
this unholy labyrinth. I admit itBI'm
behind the curve.
Like many people these days, I have mixed feelings about the
proliferating technology for reading these days. I like physical books, and I have the
thousands to prove it. I have always
liked books, even before I could read, which was pretty early in my life.
But I have also always loved television. I was the one who played with the knobs to
see what would happen (and then my father would have to come and fiddle around
until he fixed it. HmmBmaybe
that's why he would never let me near the record player.) When my father was no longer part of the
household, I was the one in the family who could retrieve a picture from the
mess of wavy lines on the screen.
I have stuck to both throughout my life. I know there were and are those who believe
that television is harmful to developing minds.
I disagree, with two caveats: one, that a child spend an equal amount of
time outside doing something that involves exercise, and two, that he or she do
it with other people, not figures on a screen.
In my distant rosy childhood, the lines between the media were
blurred. In my elementary school, my
friends and I would play at recess (yes, outside) by making up episodes for the
television shows that we all watched.
Most involved horses, but we also incorporated stereotype: good guys,
bad guys and women. In our stories, the
women stayed home and wore dresses. None
of my friends wanted to be stuck playing women.
It was a girls' school. Maybe we were ahead of our time?
My position on ebooks is that we as writers can't stop the critters,
so we might as well get used to them. I
bought an ereader when my first estory, "Called Home," was published. It seemed wrong to me to know that I had a
story that was published but I couldn't see it.
So that story was my first purchase for my Nook.
The second was a truly obscure short story written by Herman Melville
about the chimney in his house. I wanted
to read it because I was trying to understand the 18th-19th century attitudes
toward hearth and home, and Melville took the time to set down his (at great
length). I'm sure this exists in a book
somewhere, but I did not have the time or the patience to go find it in print. My defenses were crumbling.
The final blow came when I was doing research for my next Museum
Mystery (currently nameless). The book
revolves around the Philadelphia actor Edwin Forrest who was one of the shining
stars of the nineteenth century stage but who is little known today. In the quarter-century following his death in
1872, many of his colleagues wrote about him in glowing termsBpages
and pages of lush Victorian prose, mostly out of print and hard to find. I could have ordered POD copies (in fact, I
did at first) but when confronted with the transcript of the actor's very messy
divorce from his actress wife, which ran to over a thousand pages, I threw in
the towel and downloaded a copy to the Nook.
No, I haven't read all of it, but I have read parts (the juicy bits, of
course). And now I feel virtuous about
all the trees I have spared and all the shelf space I have saved.
But it was not until quite recently that I read a bookBa
regular piece of fiction, currently available in bookstores. I survived the
adventure, although every time I hit the screen I seem to come up with some
command I wasn't looking for. Or knew
existed. It seems Nook and I needs must
become better acquainted for a real relationship to develop.
But I've taken the first step, and the second and the third. There are more current books waiting on my
Nook. Whatever the format, it's still about our words, isn't it?
