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

bookstores are faltering and closing their stores.
    But browsing through a bookstore is slow—just as slow, in fact, for ebooks as for print books. Whether you’re walking down an aisle at your local bookstore or clicking through different categories and subcategories of content on Amazon.com, it’s time-consuming.
    A better approach than browsing might be something like a Foursquare for bookshelves, so people could become the self-appointed librarians or mayors of a given stack of books and provide recommendations for good books in their section. They could not only function as experts at their local bookstore, but also operate on a regional or national scale. To provide an incentive for good recommendations, an element of competition could be added, with the mayor-librarians defending their turf from would-be challengers.
    Imagine checking in once you’ve read a book on a given topic and developing subject area expertise on something more productive than the microbrews served at the local bar during happy hour. Maybe I’m a tad bookish, but I think an ebook-infused Foursquare would be an interesting idea for a startup. You’d check in every time you read a given ebook and gradually rise in stature within the domain of your expertise in a measurable, uncontestable way. On finishing a book— ka-ching! —you’d score points on this online social system. And if I’ve learned anything from social media, it’s that we like to get rewards. They motivate us, especially when our reputation is at stake.
    I can especially see this socialization of learning happening now that encyclopedias and other top-down sources of authority have been tossed in the Dumpster in favor of crowd-sourced information like Wikipedia, and as sites like Goodreads and Amazon’s own Shelfari democratize book recommendations. But social reading is still relatively new.
    Do you trust the recommendations of people online who you’ve never met? If so, have you discovered a great book through any of these sites? Or better—because we are social, after all—have you met any really interesting people through using these sites? I’d like to hear your story, because let’s be honest: you’re never going to have an enjoyable chat with Amazon’s or Apple’s book recommendation software!
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/6.html

The Neurobiology of Reading
    I’ve learned a number of things about the nature of reading and e-reading that are essential to understanding where we are in these early stages of the ebook revolution and how much further the revolution needs to go to be truly successful.
    First and foremost, e-readers don’t hold a melted candle to print books in terms of how crisp and textured their ebooks can be.
    When I look at my favorite print books from a tactile perspective, I’m drawn to my childhood Bible, with its thin, translucent onionskin pages like starched Kleenexes. Or my Boy Scout manual with its curiously dated but somehow reassuring 1970s color palette. Or my pulp science-fiction magazines from the 1930s with their brittle, yellowed pages that flake if you turn them too fast and have a texture surprisingly like fiberglass.
    The current displays for e-readers are too primitive to adequately convey texture. There’s something artistic about eInk, about the almost-random accumulation of tiny titanium dioxide balls in a bath of black ink. But eInk does not produce a warm texture. It’s not soft and reassuring like a weathered, slightly scruffy page from an old book. And I can see how poorly an ebook’s text mimics the type in a print book. Even seen under a magnifying glass, the type is too pixelated.
    No e-reader is able to match the resolution of reality. At best, current eInk readers are able to show 200 dots per inch of resolution, but that’s paltry when you consider that even the most mediocre of mass-market books is printed at 300 dots per inch, and photography and art books commonly have two or four times as much texture. If you’re on the side of print books, I agree with you on this one. They win on texture, and ebooks still have a long way to go.
    There’s also a solidity to print books that lends itself well to the gravitas of the ideas expressed within or to the solidness of the story. Moreover, the sense of touch—of pages that are perhaps rough or smooth or crisp or corrugated—gives readers an anchor, continually re-establishes a link between the book and the reading experience, and prevents the