“Hard Copy Anyone?”
(Missing the Newspaper)
By Glenn Peppers
I couldn’t sleep very well last night! So I got up around 5:30am to take care of some business, and read the paper (online). Gosh I miss having a physical newspaper in hand. The sound and ruffling of the newsprint pages. The faint smell of ink. I miss the sales papers featuring all that cool stuff I never actually buy! The coupons (especially the restaurant coupons)! I miss the supermarket coupons!
You know, with all these vast new modes of information at our fingertips. I have to say that it is actually very cool living in these, Buck Rogers/Jetsons futuristic Tech-zone I dreamt of coming to pass in the 1960’s; yet all this progress gives me brain overload, because I am a avid reader, and studier of just about, everything!
Still I (like many of you), I like folding my Readers Digest! I miss newspaper drives, and paper mache art projects! I miss corner newspaper stands in downtown Detroit, with Wrigley’s chewing gum, hot peanuts and flaming hot Lays (and Jay’s) potato chips, and skins! Sure I like I like E-books, I’m an Author! Well, lets just say, I kinda-sorta like E-books! I miss nice big hard cover/coffee table books, and hardback novels with fancy and creative book place markers in 3D, and made of silk with catchy phrases on them! I miss the days when you could give books to someone for a present, anytime of the year, and they loved it!
I miss Dalton’s Bookstores! I miss my mid-week trek to the Main Library downtown, and filling my table up with books of every sort! Like many of you, I’d spend an entire day down at the main branch, emersed in literature, history, and knowledge of the ancients flowing through my fingers and eyes, and into my soul! Something about gaining this knowledge byway of an e-book doesn’t feel as connective, or embraceable! Its almost as if the physicality and heaviness of the book itself links you somehow to the writer mind-scape. In fact, I surly do feel that it does. In final print, the author has a hard copy of his or her’s own book. They’ve approved it. They may have even helped design its cover, and its layout. They’ve felt the roughness of the pages, and folded its sleeve, and smelled the grade of paper, and the ink, just like we have when we cradle and covet and read their works, their very spillage of the soul onto paper!
Yes, from my love of comic books as a young man in the 1960’s, on up to my love of just about any biography and great work that I have an interest in; I’ve always loved to own the work itself. In doing so, you become apart of that process of creativity the author is bestowing upon their readers! There’s nothing like closing a book after finishing it, and putting it away on the shelf, and saying, “I’ll read that again one day!”
A hard cover book is something you can feel, touch, and even anticipate with a nice cup of coffee and chocolate chips! I don’t share that feeling with an e-book! Once an e-book is done, it feels like I’ve just finished watching a Youtube clip. When you shut the i-Pad/computer or other tablet device off, its gone! No beautiful cover to catch a glance at. No interesting decoration piece. No physical reminder to ever read it again! Heaven help you if your computer or tablet crashes, or it drops the signal while you’re reading or downloading. Or even worse than that, when and if you lose a flash drive that your newly purchased e-book is downloaded upon. That can be disheartening; and all so impersonal!
In the not so distant past, Books made great decorations, and are even considered works of art, and keepsake items! How many of us (our parents and grand parents included) keep or kept family photos and marriage license’, and birth certificates within the pages (or between the book covers) of Bibles, and other books that families hold dear as a family heirlooms and keepsakes!
Yeah, I know I can rekindle (there’s that word... “Kindle!”) my home delivery subscription to The Detroit Free Press, and the Detroit News. In fact, I’m seriously thinking about it, if not but once a week. I’d have my Sunday Paper again! Then it occurred to me. Maybe a nice walk to the corner store will be what I need in order to get my laps in, and at the same time, pick up a Sunday Paper. My son even expressed how he likes having a hard copy of a real book in his hands to read, instead of an electronic reading device! I know I sound old fashioned, and outdated, but this detachment from things physical onto a world more virtual and 3D oriented is a hard adjustment for people like me, who were use to exclusively feeling an author; and not just by their writings, but by their presentations of their vessel used to convey the message. Its almost like a personal delivery!
So as I pass the time away on social media, tweeting, face booking, and reading every news outlet in the world’s headlines -- online. I still miss sitting and reading one newspaper, and one magazine at a time. So now I must go. Let me turn the page, and start my day! In the words of Paul Harvey... Good day!
Glenn Peppers 8-9-13
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