Keep Your Hand On That Plow

Keep Your Hand On That Plow
Keep Your Hand On That Plow

Thursday, March 3, 2011

OMG: Old Media Guilt from Forbes.com


My editorial that appeared at Forbes.com's Booked blog earlier this week.

OMG: Old Media Guilt

Mar. 1 2011 -
Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
Cover via Amazon
Hopelessly devoted to your mass-market paperbacks, or an early adapter of the Kindle? In the following piece, history professor and author James Tuten wrestles with guilt over falling in love with his e-reader — and muses on the future of reading and publishing.


OMG – I love my Kindle. There, I said it. As a historian, I know well the musty scent of book mold wafting up like some pheromone of erudition from a long unopened tome. The dimly lit stacks of a library are among the most delightful places in the world for the likes of us.

As the sort of people who are on a first-name basis with librarians, historians and English professors, are thrilled to hold a new book, to crack the binding and break it in like a new pair of shoes.
Yet when I have traveled lately by plane or car I have found it remarkably convenient to take the Kindle along instead of two or three printed books.


I have used it to download free copies of books that are out of copyright like The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Art of War, Life on the Mississippi and Moby Dick. I have purchased newer but less exalted books too. It doesn’t strain my eyes. It’s easy to carry.  Household harmony has improved too as I never steal my wife’s bookmarks anymore. The Kindle marks for me.

Lately, though, in conversations about technology and gadgets, the talk will turn to e-readers and I find myself embarrassed to admit I have a Kindle.

I suffer from OMG. No, not the adolescent texting shorthand, but something that strikes to the very hearts of many people over 40: Old Media Guilt. It strikes me nearly every time I purchase something for my e-reader.  Sometimes when I slide the switch to settle in for a good read I feel the clammy hand of OMG seizing my conscience. Why, why am I turning my back on the books, magazines and yellowed news clips that nurtured me?

In my town I can’t get a major newspaper delivered to my door. Most days I get one while I am out and about, but on Sunday morning I used to always go out to the store and pick up a Washington Post or New York Times. Now, if I am in a hurry, or if it’s really cold out, I read it online. I never see all the articles that way, of course. I see far fewer ads (which, to my surprise, I miss a bit), as they seem easier to ignore online.  The online version has only three things going for it: It’s free to me; I don’t have to leave the house to get it; and I can easily e-mail or post an article I like.

It comes at the price of more bibliophile guilt, though. It reveals the killer inside me. I am helping to kill newspapers.  I really like journalists too. They are among the most interesting people I have known, and yet I am doing my part to send them to the unemployment line.

When I enter a bookstore, where I have spent idyllic hours, the guilt pangs are strongest. Today it looks as though bookstores are doomed by e-readers with not only independents disappearing but the big box chains already retrenching. The recent demise of the venerable chain Borders is the most recent evidence of the slow death of bookstores. In the coming decades more readers like me will commit the ultimate betrayal and go digital. This is all the more sad to me because my first book was published this past fall and each of the book signings I gave was co-sponsored by a different independent bookstore.

When magazines die in their print form, like American Heritage or Paste, and I find I am following them more closely than ever in their online-only afterlives — yet I get the OMG.
At its worst, my guilt takes me to a dismal bed where I am visited by the ghost of Media Future. In this apocalyptic world there are no brick and mortar book stores, public libraries have lost all funding and closed, all books are published in a digital format, newspapers are written by untrained hacks with no editing taking place, and book signings then would be dimly remembered.

At least there would be no more waiting in a slow-moving line to get 30 seconds in front a celebrity author. Authors need not risk catching a cold from the grubby book-signing attendees. Instead, an in-demand author like J. K. Rowling could hold virtual signings from her castle with fans all over the world.

So get ready, you can be a pioneer collector of digital first-editions.