Where do they find these people?

I have always wondered where lifestyle reporters find interview subjects who conveniently suffer from the exact angst du jour highlighted the article. In this case the story is that there are couples in America in which one prefers to read paper books and the other prefers to read e-books. (See the couple above captured spontaneously in their living room reading on differing devices.) She loves the way books smell; he thinks books are so Middle Ages and hates the whole “smell” thing.

The writer concedes that it’s not clear how widespread this quiet agony of marriages strained to the breaking point by divergent preferences of reading platforms is but insists that “the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.”

Apparently, there is also some concern among digital evangelists about the resiliency of paper:

“There is much more emotional attachment to the paper book than there is to the CD or the DVD,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “It is not logical — it’s visceral.”

Right? Because there’s no logic to people preferring the device that you can pick up and read after you’ve dropped it off the Empire State Building.

What almost every article that sets out to reveal the tension between e-readers and paper readers is the notion that there necessarily must be a philosophical motivation behind the choice, deeply rooted in each individuals world view and sense of self, but my sense is that such motivations are often more prosaic. I’m not an early adopter of e-reading technology for several reasons. One is that I can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on technology that will cost half as much a year from now and be obsolete in two. Another is that I know if I bought one, I’d never use it and then feel guilty. I reason I don’t use the iCal app on my computer isn’t that I like the smell of the half dozen to-do lists strewn about by desk. I don’t use it because I know that if I did, one item on my hand-scrawled to-do lists would be “Transfer to-do lists to iCal.”