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

to see the incessant shipments of everything from books to Beanie Babies, DVDs to diapers.
    Protected by his executive assistants and sequestered in a tower in Amazon’s headquarters, Jeff’s office was a little like a walled garden. It’s an appropriate metaphor, because what Jeff and I discussed that day, and on days and weeks to follow, had to do with Kindle’s own walled garden.
    When you’re reading about companies like Amazon and Apple, you often come across the “walled garden” metaphor. I want to explain it to you with a visual metaphor, because I’m a visual guy.
    Imagine the wall of a medieval fortress. There might even be a moat around it. It’s a tall wall, made of stone—a wall to keep the enemy out. There’s one way into and out of the fortress, and that’s over a drawbridge that comes clanking down to let you across the moat, through a hole in the wall, and into the city inside. You can think of the city as being everything good that the wall is supposed to be protecting—all the people and gardens inside. This wall protects you from the dragons outside, from the Vandals and Huns and would-be conquerors.
    In tech terms, the walled garden is the arrangement of software and hardware and file format that makes it almost impossible to get to what’s inside unless you go over the drawbridge, the officially sanctioned way in.
    Look at the iPod. It relies on a proprietary format, a proprietary way of getting content into and out of the device. And yet it’s successful because the walled garden is tended so carefully.
    Amazon has a similar walled garden for the Kindle. The only way you can buy a book and read it on the Kindle, according to Amazon’s walled garden approach, is to buy the book from the Kindle store. Are there other ways of reading a book on a Kindle? Yes, but they’re equivalent to the Vandals and Huns laying siege to the city by running ladders up its ramparts and then climbing those ladders with axes and grappling irons. In modern tech terms, this kind of attack is piracy. Or if not outright piracy, it’s that gray area related to digital rights management (called DRM)—the restrictions used to keep people from copying or sharing ebooks for free.
    DRM works against most would-be pirates because it’s often too difficult and exasperating to break. Difficult, but never impossible. It’s a game of cat and mouse, and there’s always a genius who outsmarts the current DRM that’s out on the market. And then the software people at Amazon and Apple and elsewhere respond with patches and updates to make their walls more secure. Apple, for example, releases about ten updates a year to its iTunes software, and most of them include anti-piracy measures.
    As ethical readers, you and I don’t need to worry much about what DRM means, and it’s not likely to affect us. But because occasional readers do try to pirate ebooks, we’re all penalized by the increased cost of ebooks and the inconvenience in copying them to other devices. That process should be easy, but often it’s painstaking. I 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.
    Likewise, there’s another technicality with ebooks called “file format” that we don’t have to worry about with printed books. There’s only one format for a printed book, and that’s paper. You can pick up any printed book and read it, as long as you know the language. The format of the book is no barrier to reading.
    But imagine having to wear special glasses to read books by different publishers. Imagine you needed one pair of glasses to read Random House books and another to read Simon & Schuster books. Each pair of glasses would be sensitive to the invisible inks each publisher used. Well, that’s what it’s like with ebooks now.
    Amazon has its own ebook format, and Adobe makes another ebook format called ePub . There are many formats on the market. If you live in Japan and want to read ebooks, for example, you have two incompatible ebook formats to choose from.
    Formats make things difficult. There’s no way I can take a book I bought for my Kindle and copy it onto a Sony device—not unless I use some technical wizardry, some illegal tools that can be downloaded from the shady side of the internet. And most consumers aren’t going to learn how to use these obscure wizard’s tools. Like you, they’ll be confronted with a choice of