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

temporarily relieved, but I knew that there’d be even harder work in the months and years ahead—not just for me or for Amazon, but for the billion-dollar book industry.

Bookmark: Knapsacks, Book Bags, and Baggage
    Our Stone Age ancestors developed an innovation that I doubt few of us today could replicate, alone in the wilderness: the simple pot.
    Whether it held water, seeds, or honey, I think the pot was the single greatest invention of the Stone Age. Before its invention, people most likely had to live closer to rivers or try to carry water with their hands, a futile task. Containers like the humble pot allowed people to spread geographically, to move and transfer goods and objects easily, and to improve the quality of their lives in a game-changing way. I think the ability to conceptualize and enclose volume in a man-made artifact is one of the keys to civilization.
    The high-tech equivalent of the humble pot is the information cloud.
    We don’t know where the cloud is taking us as a society. It’s something like a magic carpet, and we’re aloft on it, flying above everything, uncertain of our destination. The cloud is in essence a container for digital goods, and it’s already revolutionized the way we store those goods. It’s a clever way of enclosing yet more content in a much smaller area. The cloud is a giant pot with near-infinite volume and near-zero size. I’ll expand on this subject in the chapter “Our Books Are Moving to the Cloud,” but for now, I’ll note that because of the cloud, we no longer have to haul ebooks or information with us as we travel.
    That makes satchels, book bags, and hand baggage increasingly useless as we adopt ebooks.
    As a kid, I would manhandle an enormous book bag in school every day. I never had time to run back to my locker and replace books between classes, so I carried my full day’s allotment of books with me to all the classes I attended. After four years of this in junior high and another four years in high school, my shoulders were unusually well developed for a skinny, nerdy guy. But it was frustrating, tiresome work. I needed to buy a new book bag every few months. And every year, we would be inspected for scoliosis in gym class, no doubt partly because of all the books we had to haul, crushing our spines into sad, deformed springs.
    Luckily for kids and their back doctors, this is no longer necessary.
    And on adopting digital books, you no longer need to haul boxes of books with you every time you move to a different home. Gone are the days of duct-taping shoddy cardboard boxes from U-Haul or liquor stores and still watching your books explode onto the sidewalk when movers accidentally drop the over-heavy boxes. As the heir to the Stone Age pot, the cloud makes moving easier for those of us with large holdings of books.
    A digital book weighs less than the whisker of a fly. So there’s no strain with the digital. You don’t have to haul digital books in cardboard boxes or book bags, so digital books are easy on the shoulders, and on the eye. But clearly, I’m a believer in the digital. Are there drawbacks to ebooks, in this sense? Absolutely. The sheer massiveness and weight of books adds a kind of gravitas to a home. Books in a home say that someone literate lives there, someone with specific sensibilities and tastes. A home with fully digitized music and ebooks and other media seems barren to me, like a minimalist Bauhaus detention cell, someplace unfit for friends and family. But that’s me. What do you think of books as decorations or as hefty physical objects to be lugged about?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/4.html

Improving Perfection: Launching the Kindle2
    Improving the Kindle meant more than making better hardware, although I didn’t realize that immediately.
    As a program manager, I got to fly into any building, any country, and do whatever it took to get my product shipped. A part of the job was making sure that people were on schedule, but another part was more punitive, requiring me to check out their dirty laundry. I had to be the eyes and ears of the Kindle executive team. And to do this, I had to know more about the Kindle than almost anyone except Jeff Bezos.
    Being Kindle’s program manager let me see how decisions were made all across the Kindle organization. I participated in meetings with teams all over the globe, as well as with the vice presidents and Jeff in Seattle. I had an opportunity to see and influence what was