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

hard-core, hard-boiled businesspeople. That’s why you see the likes of Microsoft and Amazon and Boeing around Seattle. Frankly, it wasn’t the most auspicious place to start a venture that would revolutionize books.
    Places like New York and Los Angeles are still rooted in the arts. New York has theater and publishing and advertising, and L.A. was founded on Hollywood, the movies. You don’t get that artistic sensibility in Seattle, and you can tell by looking at the current Kindle and all the knockoffs that copy its design. Bullish as I am about ebooks, something is missing, and this flaw is perpetuated by the fact that all the e-readers are made in Silicon Valley. Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble all have designers in Silicon Valley because that’s where the technical talent is. But what you don’t get with this technical talent is an artistic, book-oriented design.
    As consumers and readers, we’re not dummies. We don’t want an impoverished reading experience. We don’t want a cracked plastic case and a blurry screen—which, sadly, is what many e-readers offered, especially in the boom years between 2007 and 2012 when everyone seemed to be trying to sell a budget e-reader. For good or for bad, we define ourselves in many ways by the gadgets we use and the clothes we wear. We don’t want to surround ourselves with cheap products. Nobody really aspires to that. We also don’t want to pay for a diamond-encrusted e-reader. We don’t need bling; we just need to feel like the design speaks to us.
    That’s the genius of print book covers. There’s a reason why print book covers evolved to a highly specialized, soulful art form. They add very little to the cost of a book, and yet they make reading a vibrant, colorful experience. When you think back to a book you’ve read, you’ll often remember the cover before you remember any words or ideas. As designers re-embrace the original strengths of print books, I think we’ll see more book-oriented themes in future e-readers.
    Eventually, the line between print and digital will blur and finally vanish. Ebooks borrow from print books now, in terms of their design metaphors. They copy bookmarks and annotations, as well as the concepts of turning the page and of page numbers themselves—even though page numbers don’t even make sense in an ebook.
    What’s a page number? What’s a page, if you can dynamically change the font size or the font? What’s a page, if you have a game embedded in the book and the game spans many levels? These design metaphors are yesteryear bolt-ons from physical to digital. But there’s an opportunity to reinvent the digital reading experience while keeping the best parts of print.
    Companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more engaging. Children’s ebooks should be playful and adult ebooks thoughtful, soulful, or entertaining. Companies should create opportunities for interesting, unexpected experiences to happen. Perhaps digital insects scuttle across the page if you’ve had the book open for too long without turning the page. Perhaps in a thriller, as you read the ebook, you’re startled by the unexpected sound of a gunshot when you turn the page to a crucial passage. Though this can’t easily be done in hardware, you can create an engaging experience in software and make it soulful instead of awful.
    Let’s face it: there’s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle. Perhaps over time the industrial design will become more human, more like the “illustrated primer” described in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age . Or like the book Penny used in the Inspector Gadget TV series, a digital book with actual pages that could be turned. Better design will be part of the rebirth of reading. But to get there, we must be as ready to innovate in design and soul as we are in technology and cost.
    The company that does this best is Apple. They blew away everyone’s preconceptions about e-readers when they launched the iPad.
    The iPad story is a great one, but I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t have to put in the grueling hours or countless meetings on product development. It’s one of those stories that we get to read and enjoy. One of those stories where you say that the author did an amazing job. And Steve Jobs did.
    Apple understands a lot, including great product design. The iPad is a multifunction device, unlike other