I read with interest, online, Summit Daily News publisher Nicole Miller’s letter to readers regarding changes coming to the weekend editions. Most interesting to me were her remarks regarding the growth of the paper’s digital footprint. I’m sure there are readers who will lament the inevitable transition of their favorite newspaper to an online format.
And while I can understand those concerns, I’ve been on that analog-to-digital curve for a while now, and I can tell you all — it’s gonna be OK. My trip down that road began with converting my library of cassette tapes to MP3. It was a yearlong project, but the mobility and easy access it gave to my music library was huge for me.
Soon after, I quit buying albums and made the transition to streaming services. With that change I gained access to millions of titles, something I’d never have were I still librarying up an album or a track at a time. When it comes to my preferred reading medium, I’m well down the road to fully digital already.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved newsprint, and the Summit Daily has been the last bastion of that endearing tradition for me. Reading hardcopy newspapers has a long history with me, including very early and fond childhood memories of lying on the family room floor on Sunday mornings reading the “funnies” with my dad and siblings. Later, the newspaper was central to my morning routine, always open on the kitchen table while I prepared and ate breakfast.
I especially liked the tabloid format of the Rocky Mountain News (and hence Summit Daily) because it would lie flat on the table while I ate, no folding of the pages or bulging middle sections complicating things. My transition to reading on digital platforms was primarily — I now realize as I write this — to enable hands-free or single-handed reading. I’ve always been an omnivorous book reader, gorging on novels, biographies and works on history and social and political science.
Many of those books ran very long. It’s hard to read an 800-page hardback while eating a piece of fried chicken. Paperbacks are worse; they’ll always be a two-handed endeavor.
With the purchase of my first Fire tablet, my reading world changed, and I’ve never looked back. One of the bummers with going all digital with book reading is the demise of bookstore and library browsing. I used to really enjoy perusing those shelves, checking out covers and titles to see what caught my attention.
But nowadays, I download 99.9% of my books from libraries digitally, and I can’t remember the last time I bought a book. One of the benefits of this transition has been the ability to search digitally.
Using my smartphone or tablet, I can find books by author, subject and/or genre in a matter of seconds from anywhere. And that includes the bonus of discovering random titles the website search algorithm thinks I’ll like based on my query and check-out history. So, while I miss the tactile sensation of analog books and the slightly musty old book smell in libraries or the new book scent in bookstores, I do find a lot of joy in searching online for my next read.
The analog-to-digital transition that’s taken the longest for me has been reading the news. The Summit Daily is one of the few publications that I still read in a paper format, though admittedly I spend more time browsing it online. The beginning of the end of newsprint for me was the advent of COVID-19 pandemic and the inability to get the Denver Post delivered regularly after that.
There are sections of the paper that I keep around past the date of delivery for later reading, the op-ed pages in particular (go figure). But as for the rest of the sections, the news moves very fast these days, and today’s delivery of yesterday’s paper brings with it a heaping dose of “tell me something I don’t already know”. Reading a physical paper has for a while felt like a bit of a luxury to me.
I enjoy it for the relaxation it provides and the break from screen time. So, while I’m prepared for the day that the Summit Daily is no longer available in newsprint, I’ll certainly always feel a bit of nostalgia for it. But you certainly can’t deny the convenience and efficiency of having everything at your fingertips via your device.
With it I can check my email, read the Summit Daily News and other news outlets, do some online banking, watch a broadcast of the local news or a video on YouTube, take notes for column ideas, and when I’m done with all of that, kick back and read the latest novel that I’ve checked out. All with one hand. Tony Jones' column "Everything in Moderation" publishes biweekly on Thursdays in the Summit Daily News.
Jones is a veteran of the IT industry and has worked in the public and private sectors. He lives part-time in Summit County and Denver. Contact him at eimsummit@gmail.
com..
