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

They could have started digitizing their holdings in the late 1970s, Xerox could have made the device, and the teletype network could have been used to distribute content. Though the process would be considered slow by today’s standards, an average ebook could be transmitted over teletype in about ninety minutes.
    But that’s a future that never was.
    Sony started the ebook revolution. But if Kindle was to do for reading what the iPod did for music and what TiVo did for digital television, Amazon needed to make a device that not only used the cell phone network, but also took advantage of new game-changing technologies such as eInk, which is touchy and temperamental.
    I’m not going to try to fully explain how eInk works, with its vocabulary of ghosting and quantum mechanical waveforms. You see, eInk is actually based on quantum mechanics. I studied quantum mechanics at MIT, and I still don’t fully understand eInk!
    Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor for something like eInk, which is at once scientific and magical, is that of the Magic 8 Ball. You shake it up and ask a question, and a ghostly white answer mysteriously floats to the surface. That’s similar to how eInk works. A bright-white particle, usually made from titanium rust, is electrically charged and floats in black ink. But instead of shaking the ball to get the white to rise to the surface, you apply an electrical charge.
    If you do this enough times, with hundreds of thousands of tiny bits of titanium rust, you basically get the modern eInk screen. The ink is black, and the charged particles are white, producing the two simplest colors on an eInk screen. To get shades of gray, you apply a quick pulse of electricity, just enough to attract some of the particles, but not all of them.
    Arthur C. Clarke could have been describing eInk when he said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” True, eInk is complex, but it requires very little power. In fact, an eInk-based device can function on as little as one charge a month. This was the game-changing technological leap that allowed the ebook revolution to start.

Bookmark: Annotations
    I don’t annotate my books. Personally, I think that defiles the printed page. But I know that some people see annotations as a cherished way of life, a way of reconnecting with themselves as they were across the span of years. These people can look at their books and see what they highlighted years earlier with their pencils or fluorescent markers.
    All e-readers let you annotate to your heart’s content. You can underline whatever you want, and your annotations and highlights will, of course, follow you from device to device. That is, assuming you buy devices from the same manufacturer.
    I think Amazon will support its own ecosystem for handling annotations, as will Sony. But there’s no interoperability yet for annotations among different devices, and there may never be. For the next ten years, your annotations will probably be tied to your choice of ebook retailer. Once you choose a retailer, you’re going to be more likely to stick with it, because you’re going to want your annotations, highlights, and all the books that you already purchased to follow you around as part of your ongoing library.
    But what happens decades from now if people want to see what you wrote in your books—perhaps because of scholarly, archival, or genealogical interests? If you’re not around anymore, or your account with Amazon or Apple is closed, your annotations will be gone.
    That’s sad, because annotations add lasting value in helping to understand a person’s path through life. One of my favorite books is a very dense volume called The Road to Xanadu , which was written in 1927 about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mental life. Its author, John Livingston Lowes, analyzed all the books that were in Coleridge’s library and books he borrowed from friends, as well as annotations he made in those books and in his journals, and pieced together how Coleridge came up with every word in every line in just one of his poems. The 600-page book attempts to explain exactly how his imagination worked for that one particular poem. That kind of literary detective work simply wouldn’t be possible without annotations left behind by the original author.
    No one I know is planning an archive service for annotations. It’s a potential startup opportunity, although a very niche one. Perhaps such a startup