The Bookworm Has Turned

According to an article in the New York Times, the advent of eBooks is helping to liberate bookworms from the stigma they’ve traditionally faced.  Apparently,  it used to be that when you saw someone sitting alone in the corner, reading a book, you subconsciously labeled him/her as a social misfit with no friends.  Now, according to the researchers, if you see a person alone reading on an iPad or Kindle, you assume s/he is online and simultaneously sharing each literary epiphany with a gaggle of Facebook friends.

 

Many of my favorite vacations have been taken with just me and a suitcase full of books, so I find it interesting that all those years people have apparently been looking down their noses at me, or feeling sorry for me. Poor outcast me, lazily swinging and reading alone in my hammock, or sitting at a table for one in a restaurant immersed in a page turner. Who knew?

Personally, I’ve always respected, or at least felt a kinship to those sitting alone and reading a book, and would surreptitiously try to get a measure of the person by glimpsing the cover of the book they were reading. But, there’s the rub of this whole eBook revolution. The bookworm’s status has just been raised not by what they’re reading, but by what they’re reading on. Show up at Starbucks with a shiny new iPad and all you have to do is sit there in a corner, soaking up the admiration of your fellows, and it doesn’t matter if you have porn, trash … or for that matter, nothing at all on the device. Holy McLuhan, Batman! The medium is kicking the the crap out of the message.