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

e-readers, which locks you into the format of the books you’re able to read. And once you’re locked into the format, you’re locked into what kinds of books you can read. You may find that a book you want to read is only available for Kindle, but if you have another device, then you can’t purchase the book until it eventually becomes available on that device.
    The Kindle has its own proprietary format. And it’s an old format, one that dates back to the 1990s and applications written for PDAs. Now, I worked at Amazon, and I know the Kindle format inside and out. I couldn’t have told Jeff this at the time—but as much as I hate to say this, I believe the Kindle file format was limited and made for poorer-quality ebooks.
    Here’s how to think about ebook file formats: think about their fidelity to printed books. When we speak of music, we often speak in terms of lo-fi or hi-fi, that is, low or high fidelity. The same terms are appropriate for ebooks. Think of a print book as the gold standard for quality. A book in the Kindle format would be able to reproduce most of the text (though not all the accent marks and sometimes obscure symbols) and is often able to reproduce the margins or the page breaks in the print book.
    I estimate the Kindle format to have achieved something like 50 percent fidelity compared to print. It’s on the lo-fi side. But I think formats that launched in the years after Kindle, such as the one being used in both the Nook and iPad, are more hi-fi, because they allow designers to do typographically compelling high-design flourishes, as well as embed fonts and complex equations into the ebook. These formats approach 90 percent of print fidelity.
    I’m a book lover, and I cared a lot about improving the file format when I was on the Kindle team. But to Jeff and others, file format was just one of many issues that needed to be taken into consideration in launching Kindle. And besides, in the early days, most people on the Kindle team didn’t worry about these lo-fi and hi-fi details, because Kindle was targeted at readers buying genre fiction like romance books and sci-fi and bestsellers. Even in print, these kinds of books aren’t stylistically nuanced.
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    I dealt with crises of all stripes and sizes as we prepared to launch Kindle, but all the issues eventually got solved, one by one.
    Before I knew it, there was just one day left before Kindle launched.
    We don’t know what it was like for Gutenberg in the hours before he unveiled his Bible and the secrecy was finally lifted. Until then, was he furtive, fearful that any secret would be stolen and copied? We don’t know how he or his workers felt. Sure, we know that pies were introduced in the 1450s, and we can imagine Gutenberg going outside with his workers that day and serving them celebratory slices of quail pie and glasses of plum gin or something special from his larder.
    Some of his workers were no doubt hungover from the night before, drunk in a corner and being licked by the dogs after celebrating their victory, but maybe others could see how important the printed book would be. Because truly, Gutenberg had launched something at once commonplace and innovative—a humble Bible, but one set in beautiful, printed type. He unwittingly launched the Protestant Reformation, as well as a shift in reading so profound that we’re feeling aftershocks of the original tremor even now, centuries later.
    Five hundred years later, on the eve of the ebook revolution, I settled in for sleep the night before we launched the Kindle. But sleep was impossible; there was the nagging worry that I had surely forgotten someone or something important. I kept getting out of bed to check my email. I finally managed to get an hour’s rest before being awakened by a team in India looking for help with some last-minute problems.
    After helping them, I stayed awake in bed with prelaunch insomnia, looking out through the window and thinking. Tomorrow, once Kindle was launched, things would never be the same again for anyone. Amazon had a lot of power, and ebooks would surely capture people’s imaginations.
    I stayed awake through the early morning hours of November 19, 2007, wondering about the Kindle. What would ebooks mean for literacy, for reading, for the book itself? Would the Kindle hasten the decline of the book—a decline that had started with radio and movies and had accelerated with TV and video games and the internet—or would it