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

different, owing to each director’s interpretation. Such interpretation isn’t just stylistic or related to which actors are cast in the starring roles; sometimes whole scenes are cut. At this point, the play is no longer true to the original. The only way to understand the author’s original intent is to read it in the original line-by-line form yourself or to sample multiple directors’ takes, hoping that the author’s intent corresponds to the average interpretation of all the variants and remakes.
    Strange as it sounds, it may be impossible to experience certain kinds of books in any way other than a line-by-line read. Neither Franz Kafka nor Jorge Luis Borges will yield to the virtual, because their books are too much like poetry.
    You can’t adequately experience James Joyce’s Ulysses as a movie or a video game. You have to be bludgeoned with it as a book, overwhelmed with the magnificent, inchoate details of Dublin. Paradoxically, the only way to read this book, which takes place in the span of one day, is to read it over a lifetime.
    There’s no computer graphics studio in Hollywood that can create an ancient monster from an H. P. Lovecraft story, because the monster only lives inside the reader’s imagination. To show the face of the lurking horror, the unspeakable dread, would be to tell a different story, and not the one which Lovecraft intended.
    Of course, this is just as true for ebooks as for traditional print books. And that’s why reading will never be replaced, although it certainly will change.
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    We can’t possibly know with any accuracy what the future of reading will be like. But that won’t stop me from guessing. I think ebooks will one day evolve into something like a movie and a video game combined with the authoritative intent of an astute storyteller. I can suggest that it will be wrought and wired so deeply in our brains that the emotions we perceive from the author will be genuine as far as we’re concerned.
    We’ll feel genuine terror or elation, and we’ll be transported into another state entirely, half crafted and half real, as any good story should be. After all, the best stories are half true, half how they should have been, and half cloud. I know that doesn’t add up, and that’s as it should be. The part in the clouds is where you find yourself imagining and wondering what-if thoughts. It’s where your temporal and parietal lobes measure out ideas and your brain’s limbic system responds with affect and emotion.
    The books we read now are laboriously constructed. Their authors are sensitive to rhythm and rhyme, sonance and sibilance, rising and falling action, and intricate symbolism that sometimes takes a team of scholars to decode. We read these books because we understand the codes and conventions. It’s like an author carefully wraps something up for us, a present that we subsequently unwrap, and the act of unwrapping is reading itself. We’re taught from an early age what the codes are and how to decode them.
    Over time, I think a different form of book will eventually emerge, one that’s more rooted in the mind itself. Just as authors type or dictate content now, I think the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience. The act of encoding and decoding will become relegated to artistic flourishes, and we’ll be able to participate in the more immediate action of the author’s own mind and flights of fancy.
    The firsthand experience of life itself will come through unmediated by the encoding and decoding that we currently use in books. Words are often the worst culprits in this. They are ornaments that often get in the way of the book. Like shifting, ambivalent snakes, words are capable of so much suggestion and meaning, but they squirm when you try to pin them down.
    I anticipate instead that we will be connected mind-to-mind to the lived experiences of an author—such as the experience of nervous anticipation the next time Jeff Bezos stands on a stage to announce a new Kindle, or the terrifying experience of Felix Baumgartner jumping from a balloon in the stratosphere.
    Whether they’re more inky or phosphorescent in nature, books will follow the human spirit as it endeavors into the unknown. And though books have been relegated