From the Editors: May 2026
You can't hack a book
If you're used to regularly checking our extremely comprehensive website at eriereader.com for our cool local arts and culture coverage, our weekly local government meeting summaries, our 15 years worth of archives, or our jam-packed, locally-curated public events calendar you may have noticed that it's recently been… unavailable.
Over the past week, we've been experiencing what millions of other websites nationwide have recently been experiencing, a ransomware takedown – hackers literally trying to hold our content hostage while they simultaneously attempted to delete all of our backups. This could have been catastrophic and the INCREDIBLE folks at Epic Web Studios, the local website development company that built, runs, and maintains our massive website, has had a team working around the clock to restore it and we are eternally grateful for their work. Otherwise, what? We start over? We somehow work to rebuild the thousands of articles, photographs, and entries we've compiled over the past 15 years? To quote our publisher Adam Welsh, "It's all compromised, the whole world. There's nothing you can do if someone zeros in on you."
I've said it before, I'll say it again: long live physical media!
In an age when so much of our daily lives depends upon the fragile network of theory that is the internet – it is invaluable to be able to hold something in your hands. Can't access an online events calendar? Grab a paper! Want to know what happened at a recent council meeting but your phone is dead? Grab a paper! Itching to discover some cool new music but don't want the algorithm selling your soul? Grab a paper!
This May issue gives you a physical copy of a lot of what I mentioned in the paragraph above as it is our annual Summer Events Preview issue – if you're anything like my everything-analog-forever father-in-law (or would like to be) you can take this copy of the Reader and mark an actual calendar hanging on your actual wall with the events you don't want to miss this summer. We've got everything from live music shows, physical challenges, cultural celebrations, educational opportunities, food and drink events, farmers markets, county fairs, and more.
And as a theme running through many of our summertime events – the City of Erie hopes that you'll be sure to bring a book with you. Officially dubbed Erie's first Summer of Reading, local partners have joined forces with the mayor and the City of Erie's summer recreation programs to make literacy a priority. Going to a beach concert? Bring a book! Having lunch at a spot downtown? Bring a book! Be like Edwina this month and join a new book club! Let your children see you reading a book instead of endlessly scrolling your phone and they might just think to do the same.
If this past week has taught me anything, it is that you can't hack a book – holding a cheap (often free, if you've got that magical piece of plastic, a library card) gateway to knowledge in your hand is a powerful thing. It opens your imagination (as pictured on our cover by our very own exceptional comic artist John Bavaro), it provides different perspectives and points of view, it hones critical thinking skills, and it saves your eyeballs and brain from the flashing blue lights we've all been hunched over for way too long.
While we'll be so grateful to have our website back and running (we can't thank you enough, Epic, seriously), it's good to occasionally have this reminder, that you can never truly own the internet. Everything virtual is at the whim of any person or AI smart enough to outsmart it. But when you hold a book in your hands, when you give money directly to a musician for an actual record, when you pick up a free copy of your favorite alt paper – you're making these things permanent. You're saying something that can't be said by clicking a link – that this work is important enough to have it in its real form and to truly own it.
