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

its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products. You may not love Amazon, but you trust it as a brand. It’s sort of like the Post Office. It’s hard to love the Post Office, but you never worry much about whether your package will arrive. Although mishaps happen, the Post Office has a great track record.
    So for Amazon to launch the Kindle was like the Post Office launching a new e-letter product, a clipboard-sized plastic gadget with a screen on which you can read your letters. You trust Amazon as much as you trust the Post Office, and you absolutely want to read content as soon as it’s available. The devices save you trips to the mailbox or the bookstore, and they’re excellent adjuncts to your leisure time or business reading. But nobody ever declares themselves a Post Office fanboy and rushes to “unbox” the latest book of stamps.
    I should explain that a fanboy is a person who’s so smitten by a brand that he’s often the first in line to buy the brand’s newest gadget. A fanboy will often rush home to film the “unboxing” of his new gadget. If you’ve never heard of unboxing , which is the process of unwrapping a new tech gadget while filming it, I encourage you to search this word on YouTube and watch any of the hundreds of thousands of results.
    Unboxing is a new voyeuristic phenomenon that’s erotic and technical at the same time. It’s tech pornography. It’s as if we desire total carnal knowledge of our consumer electronics goods. The sheer number of unboxing videos on gadget websites and YouTube is a testament to how obsessed we are.
    The fanboys and gadgeteers of our culture are starved for sexy e-readers.
    We’re a culture that fetishizes technology, and the way people film the unboxing of gadgets is similar to how people ogle lingerie models on the fashion runway every year. How long will it be before we start running new product launches like fashion shows, displaying the new electronic goods on runways with sultry music, paparazzi snapping photos, and the CEO or vice president reduced to someone shilling the product like it’s next season’s lingerie, a one-handed appreciation of Silicon Valley’s newest creation?
    There’s an economics term for this called commodity fetishism . We fetishize a commodity by assuming it’s worth more than the sum of its parts. For example, the money we use is worth less than advertised, because it costs mere pennies to make a dollar bill. Beanie Babies at their peak were likewise more expensive than their pure manufacturing value. Consumers perceived that the stuffed animals had higher value, so they rocketed into the status of collectibles, like Cabbage Patch Kids.
    The idea of commodity fetishism was created by the wooly-bearded economists of the nineteenth century, making it all the more amazing that they came up with this idea in the age of the horse and buggy. It’s still surprisingly relevant now, surfacing as what I would call a techno-commodity fetish that whips people on every year to buy the latest and greatest gadgets.
    You can see the techno-commodity fetish in action every time there’s a new iPhone. Lines spiral around the blocks near AT&T and Apple stores, and fanboys wait in line for days to be first on their blocks to get the new device. Marketers are savvy to this and play it up. That’s why companies like Apple will pre-announce a new iPad: so they can take pre-orders weeks in advance of the new device’s availability and drum up demand and, at the same time, very practically let the assembly lines crank out the last of the old devices, using up all the last parts.
    By all accounts, this techno-commodity fetish is thriving, judging by the number of gadgets released every year. Barnes & Noble and Apple may have been among the first of Amazon’s competitors, but they’re not the only ones. In fact, by the start of 2013, there were forty-five eInk-based e-readers for sale, and too many tablets and smartphones to count, all with ebook support. Thanks to booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, we now enjoy instant on-demand ebooks, which to me is still something fantastic and futuristic, part The Jetsons and part The Diamond Age.

Bookmark: Book Browsing
    The ability to browse for books by their covers and flip through them from front to back before buying is also fading with the ebook revolution. It’s sad, but it’s a consequence of the way independent bookstores and even major