Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

We get hangnails and wrinkles on our feet. We drink entirely too much beer and suffer entirely too much of a hangover the next day. It’s all part of being analog, and there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it—wisdom lines, headaches, and all.
    Perhaps I only like it because I have no choice in the matter, and I choose to look the other way when I suffer stubbed toes or pimples in ungainly places like the insides of my ears. Or perhaps I like living in the analog mode because of all the great feelings I can experience, what cognitive scientists call “felt states”—the sun on my skin, the taste of a fresh blueberry, or the wonderful, fresh smell of a spring morning. I’m as happily analog as I can get, and I will be for a long while.
    And though I may be embodied in an analog form, I can still read great digital ebooks.
    Those who read this in the future may sometimes forget that books weren’t always digital. They may look back upon us with disdain because we don’t have brain implants to post live Twitter updates. They may look down upon us because we have sex with one another instead of using electronic Orgasmatrons. They may frown upon us with the face of history because we’re no more than apes who type software and emails with fingers of skin and bone, because we’re pitiful creatures who wrap rags around our frail bodies as we walk to and from work.
    I can only plead with those in the future who read this to remember that if not for us, there would be no digital books today, and the future would be less rich and nuanced. If not for us, future readers wouldn’t be floating as brains in an etheric vat, surrounded by digital books and videos and music as they sample from all of human culture like it’s one vast buffet for the mind. Those who read this years from now, please don’t forget that the future wasn’t always digital and that books weren’t always electronic.
    Because without the ebook revolution, the future could never have happened.
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    The ebook revolution is the story of a small group of people who set out to change the way the world reads. I mentioned before how I found it at once eerie and amazing to be in a meeting with Jeff Bezos, scrutinizing the number of lines that should appear on an ebook’s page, because it was the same kind of thinking Gutenberg used more than five hundred years earlier. And like Gutenberg’s team, this small group of people at Amazon worked their way up from square one to reinvent reading. And we succeeded. Reading has not only been transformed but also rebooted.
    But this success came with a cost. There were unintended consequences of this success, which meant that many ebook features had to be shelved at Amazon. It became important for Amazon and other device makers to keep up with their competition, which meant that certain innovative features were deprioritized so that resources could be spent on the arms race of keeping up with competitors. These ebook features will eventually be built; I’m not worried about that.
    Amazon launched the ebook revolution, but now, the future of books is being tended to by people outside Amazon’s walled garden. By innovative publishers or venture-capital-funded startups or iconoclastic propeller-heads. Innovation is out in the world now. It’s out of the hands of Amazon and other technology giants. I believe the smaller, more nimble, more purpose-driven groups will succeed in building these features out. And of course, as always, the readers ultimately win.
    Innovation sparked the ebook revolution. And while companies like Amazon and Apple are now raging bulls whose horns are locked in competitive combat, that innovation has gone out into the world. Publishers, as well as authors, are able to innovate. Readers themselves can innovate.
    We ourselves, as readers, can reshape the future of the book!
    We can reengage the way that books work in our own lives and fan the flame of reading again. In my generation, books have lost people’s attention spans, lost them to TV and movies and video games and the internet. But now books are being revitalized. Reading has never been more interesting, and it’s all thanks to ebooks.
    I said earlier that, to the brain, there’s no difference between the words in a book and the words in an ebook, but ebooks introduce us to more than just words. They introduce us to other people and let us talk to our friends and family, right in the margins of an ebook. New life