Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading

by Jason Merkoski

Revolution is what you get when technology and culture collide.

Books are what make us human, what set us apart from all other animals. And by connecting with books, by crossing the chasms of culture and language through them, humanity itself becomes connected. Reading—once a primarily solitary and individual activity—can now be social on a planetary scale.

Ebooks will never quite smell as nice as musty library volumes or books from your childhood

You and I both worry about what it means to put our personal libraries onto one gadget and then what would happen if we dropped it in the bathtub

you are like me, you have more books than you have friends, no matter what Facebook tells you about your social network.

The Kindle itself is just the tip of the iceberg, and its true workings are invisible.

Kindles are part computer, part book, and part cloud.

tablets.

the irony that printing began with tablets ...

It’s still amazing to me that a billionaire like Jeff—with an enormous business empire and a company that makes rocketships, no less—would take hours out of his life to obsess about line spacing, of all things!

But ebooks will rule the day, and when people a few years from now talk about “books,” what they’ll really be referring to are ebooks, not print books. Eventually the “e” will be dropped, and books will be assumed to be digital, just as most music is now digital; after all, we don’t refer to music as e-music.

Ours is a culture that dances on the edge of ephemerality.

Jeffnosanti,

think everyone agrees that it’s sad that we have to live in a world with DRM, but it’s a consequence of the technical nature of ebooks.

I estimate the Kindle format to have achieved something like 50 percent fidelity compared to print.

the future owes digital books to Jeff Bezos.

The only category of books that I think the second-generation Kindle improved on was pornography, of all things.

being a digital native may have long-term consequences related to learning how to read.

Digital books, like television and other media, are best meant for those Pandoras who’ve already opened their boxes and know what demons to expect inside.

Amazon is winning the ebook revolution, but it may lose the war.

And now that ebook content is being sold at commodity prices, the true differentiator will ultimately be in the reading experience itself.

For good or for bad, we define ourselves in many ways by the gadgets we use and the clothes we wear. We don’t want to surround ourselves with cheap products. Nobody really aspires to that. We also don’t want to pay for a diamond-encrusted e-reader. We don’t need bling; we just need to feel like the design speaks to us.

Dedicated e-readers are as sharp as steak knives in doing what they’re supposed to do, which is let you read books. The iPad is more like a Swiss Army knife—it can cut the steak and uncork a wine bottle, and there’s even a toothpick to use when you’re done eating! It’s got it all.

If you’ve got this love and respect, you’ve got a lovemark—something that combines intimacy and mystery and sensuality.

You may not love Amazon, but you trust it as a brand.

Unboxing is a new voyeuristic phenomenon that’s erotic and technical at the same time.

The idea of commodity fetishism was created by the wooly-bearded economists of the nineteenth century,

In fact, by the start of 2013, there were forty-five eInk-based e-readers for sale,

No e-reader is able to match the resolution of reality.

resolution,

what is paperwhite's resolution?

passage,

what about search function

Just as we are what we eat, we are what we read.

improved contact between people through better social connections.

Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction.

You don’t see people getting pulled over by the police for reading ebooks on their smartphones.

We have twenty-six letters, twice as many when you factor in lower and upper cases, plus a handful of common punctuation symbols. That’s about eighty different symbols, which doesn’t seem like a lot to work with. But consider DNA. Although it only has four basic nucleotides, or four symbols, these encode for all life on this planet, in all its diversity. So writing is complex.

Books are good for more than being a barrier against the outside world when you need anonymity and good for more than propping up the occasional table or chair.

I think ebooks will one day evolve into something like a movie and a video game combined with the authoritative intent of an astute storyteller.

what!?

think the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format.

Words are often the worst culprits in this. They are ornaments that often get in the way of the book.

what!?

America—the average person spends two hours watching TV every day, which is twenty times more than an average person reads—the

Books are being replaced by ebooks, and in turn, ebooks will be replaced by another seemingly science-fictional innovation, but reading in some form is here to stay.

the average American only reads seven ...

Digital book lending is swift and soulless right now.

The great potential for ebooks is that they can give you the opportunity to share and discuss a given book not just with your nearest neighbors, but with people in distant cities and even distant countries.

I know of at least two publishers that offer the ability for early readers of a book to directly contribute to the editorial process.