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

will preserve all our ephemeral electronic annotations for posterity. While the current crop of e-readers offers the ability to add annotations, those notes are often a lot more free-form and messier than text entries on a printed page.
    For instance, my mom’s cookbook is stained a hundred hues of saffron and turmeric. It’s speckled with tomato paste from numerous attempts to make pasta sauce and splattered with bits of molten butter from exploding Yorkshire puddings. Every page in the cookbook is a food-encrusted testament to meals we once had.
    No ebook can capture the history of so many Thanksgivings and Sunday brunches like my mom’s cookbook can. It’s like a combination of a scratch-and-sniff book and a time machine. The food stains themselves are palpable annotations of former meals, and I’ve got to tell you, I still use a print cookbook for my own cooking. It’s better to have cookie batter on your cookbook than on your iPad.
    Other annotations are more wordlike, but they capture you as you once were. On my writing desk I have a Wolf Scout book I used as a kid, from the time I was eight years old. It has a list of activities inside it, such as “List the ways you can save water” or “Name four kinds of books that interest you.” Free-form fields follow each activity, filled with the answers in my own handwriting. Below the form, you can see my mother’s signature and the date. So not only do I know to the day when I first learned to tie an overhand knot or put a Band-Aid on my finger, or learned to use a pair of pliers or notify the police of subversive Communist activity in the neighborhood (I grew up at the end of the Cold War after all), but I also have annotations of most of these events in my own handwriting.
    My handwriting in the book is labored, cursive, and bold; graphologists could look at my annotations and perhaps learn something about me. But they’d never learn anything beyond the factual from a sterile ebook annotation. There are paint splatters in this old Scout book, mud smudges, and decals from a Pinewood Derby racer that I built with my dad. How could they possibly fit inside an ebook, unless future e-readers allow you to insert photos inside them? (Let it be known that I never did get my merit badge in spotting Communists.)
    Is there a viable future for annotations? Perhaps. I see a glimpse of it in a recently launched web service called ReadSocial. This web-based system lets readers not only annotate a given ebook, but also comment on one another’s annotations. Best of all, it works for a variety of different ebook formats, and it’s as easy to use as logging on to Twitter or Facebook.
    By working across multiple ebook vendors and being brand neutral, ReadSocial (or one of its competitors) has the potential to become the de facto annotation engine for ebooks. Such a service may not preserve decals from my Pinewood Derby race car or smells from my mom’s cookbook or, for that matter, annotations from any print book, but it may pave the way toward creating compelling conversations in the margins of ebooks.
    And after all, isn’t that what we’re looking for? To find a kindred spirit in the pages of a book—the voice of the author or perhaps another reader—to carry on a conversation with? In this spirit, why not connect with others right now? Click on this link to meet a kindred book lover through the conversation about this chapter online.
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/3.html

Launching the Kindle
    Working at Amazon was like taking a step back in time to Seattle’s pioneer roots, back when Seattle was the gateway to the Yukon gold rush. Working on Kindle was like living in the Wild West.
    For projects that broke new ground, like Kindle, there didn’t seem to be any law, any sheriff, or any real consequences for making wrong decisions, because nobody knew the right ones. People seemed to wear their six-shooters out in the open, taking potshots at one another while hiding behind Donkey Kong machines. When vice presidents argued in the hallways, trigger fingers twitching, I could almost imagine a tumbleweed blowing between them.
    It was also impossible to tell reality from fiction. No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, and no ideas were off the table. Nothing was too strange to consider. People who thought fast often got their way and ruled the day. It was an