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

or put it with the laundry inside the washing machine. If you are like me, you have more books than you have friends, no matter what Facebook tells you about your social network.
    That said, although I love print books with all my heart, I also believe in the power of ebooks. I spent five long years at Amazon inventing ebook technology, launching devices, and creating crazy new ways of reading. Because I was on the team for so long, I became the closest there was to an ebook shaman, a tribal elder who could talk to all the people who joined Amazon after me about the early days of Kindle, provide the inside scoop. So I’m going to give you the same inside scoop—but about ebooks as a whole, not just the Kindle. This book will explain how ebooks came to be, and once you know that, you can look ahead into the future of reading, communication, and human culture.
    After all, sometimes the best way to see where you’re going is first to look back at where you came from.
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    So where did I come from? If there is a story to my life, it’s a story of books.
    Some people keep a stack of magazines in their bathroom, but I keep a stack of e-readers, like a Sony Reader and a Nook and an iPad. All different kinds. I also keep a stack of books near my bed—twenty or so heaped high on top of one another, half opened. I have books to read wherever I go, even audiobooks when I’m driving. I have more than 4,000 printed books, and I can’t even count how many ebooks I own. Fiction, nonfiction: I love it all.
    I was born in New Jersey, midway between the Garden State’s blueberry fields and Atlantic City’s casinos. My grandfather never learned how to read. He was a truck driver in New Jersey who barely managed to scrape up enough quarters over the years to send my father to college. My father worked at a newspaper and always came home smelling of newsprint and the latest headlines.
    What can I say? Ink runs in my blood. I was a shy guy at school, so I would often read—before school, during school, after school—and in retrospect, it seems like most of the time I spent at school was inside a book.
    I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and initially trained as a physicist because I wanted to know how the universe works. But I realized that math is more universal, so I changed majors. Then I realized that all I was doing with math was using symbols, like grammar. Math is a language, but you can’t tell stories with it. The English language is more expressive. So I started writing instead.
    After graduating, I wrote on nights and weekends for ten years, working on a colossal sprawling novel set in the 1930s. I had a bunch of day jobs during this time—I ran technology for a number of companies on the East Coast, and I built Motorola’s first e-commerce system. But during the dot-com boom, I took a sabbatical from work and moved to New Mexico to finish writing my novel. Everyone was making their dot-com fortunes, but I was writing about the Great Depression!
    When it was done, the book was a million words long and illustrated. I put it online as the web’s first internet novel; it was an ebook before there were ebooks. You could turn pages in your browser, annotate words or sentences you liked, and bookmark pages. If you stopped and later wanted to resume reading, you’d continue where you left off. I created all these features from scratch, little knowing that I was laying the groundwork for the first e-readers.
    Halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was living in the wilds of New Mexico again, and I heard that Amazon and Google were working on book digitization projects. As a word lover and text aficionado, I was intrigued and applied for jobs at both companies. I went through grueling interviews with each, basically locked in a conference room all day. You spend an hour with each person who comes in to interview you, and you write code on a whiteboard or draw architecture diagrams.
    It’s tough and rigorous: people sometimes leave the interview crying, knowing they’ve failed, and are escorted outside by security. Not only are the interviews hard in general, but many tech companies also throw in “bar-raisers” who ask you questions so hard that you’re supposed to feel like you’ve failed the interview.
    There I was, dressed in cowboy boots and a trippy paisley shirt, talking to overworked engineers with barbeque stains on their T-shirts. I talked about