On Late Adopting, Nooks & Me
Posted by M_Blake_Montandon on Wednesday, Oct 28, 2009
Weird confession time: I’m a bit of a late adopter. With slight Luddite tendencies, even. It’s not that I don’t love technology — I obviously do! (And please excuse me for a sec while I Skype this channel with a wireless, plug-in, v-chip crouch stance. Ah … much better.)
No, I adopt late because I am cautious. I like to wait and see. It’s as if I am saying to the latest gadget or whatev: Show me what ya got, gadget-face thing! So I waited and saw with computers, and with cell phones and lap tops, iPods, GPS and smartphones and now I have or have used all those things and mostly I dig them.
But books are different. When it comes to books, I’m like Meat Loaf — I won’t do that. Lord knows what he meant by that but what I mean is I will do almost any other type of technology at this point but I won’t do e-readers. I know, I know, I am about 87 years old. And this despite the fact that my wife works in publishing and has been telling me for about five years that e-books are the future. And I’m not blind (despite my age) — I can see that she’s right. Okay, yes, the truth is I will eventually break down and get myself an e-reader, just not yet.
The cracks in my position are already showing. Just this past weekend I came across a full page ad in some magazine for Barnes & Noble’s new addition to the e-reader market, the Nook, and I paused to appreciate its elegant design. Thing looks pretty sweet, no? (Nice manicure, too!) Apparently I am not the only one who thinks so, as B & N just announced that the Nook is its best-selling item since the product was released on Oct. 20. It won’t be easy for any new e-reader to win market share from Amazon’s Kindle but, unlike with the iPod’s dominance, between the Kindle, the Sony Reader and the Nook, it seems as if there is greater and equal innovation happening in the e-reader space than with what we’ve seen with MP3 players.
So fine. These gadgets are getting good. And at least one guy thinks the Nook is so fine, like Ryan O’Neal. I’m still not ready to make the digital leap. I am not ready to toss aside my books for all those familiar, vaguely arbitrary yet highly emotional reasons: for the feel, the smell, the covers, the page-turning pleasure. In a world where e-readers replace books I will also miss, as this other writer will, knowing what subway readers are into. I mean, how else will we be able to make snap judgments about strangers? We’ll be forced to ask them what they are reading. We’ll be forced to engage.
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I like Spring, Fall, Aleksandar Hemon, jetpacks, my kids and my wife, attractiveness, baby meatballs, the Baltimore Orioles (sigh), bloody bloody marys, and lots of other stuff. I'm a writer, ed...
