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

behind video games and movies and TV shows for their share of leisure time in America—the average person spends two hours watching TV every day, which is twenty times more than an average person reads—the art of reading will continue, although its form will surely change. Books are being replaced by ebooks, and in turn, ebooks will be replaced by another seemingly science-fictional innovation, but reading in some form is here to stay.
    And though the average American only reads seven minutes a day, and that number is dwindling, I’ll take it. I’ll happily trade an ounce of blood for a moment with a great book.

Bookmark: Indexes
    Indexes are a part of the book where ebooks suffer the most. Textbooks and most nonfiction books often have a section at the end where someone intimate with the text has scoured the book for its main subjects and created an index with the page numbers of when those subjects are mentioned. The best indexes are done by hand and are sometimes as lovingly long as a chapter in the book itself.
    One of my favorite nonfiction books, the aforementioned The Road to Xanadu , is great in part for its index, because it lists such subjects as icebergs and water snakes, opium fumes and alligator holes, green lightning and the horns of the moon. The diverse list of subjects ranges from bacon and beans to demonology and to the palace of Kublai Khan itself, from slime fishes to ice blink, and from Neoplatonism to the noise made by earthquakes.
    The current generation of ebooks ignores all the wisdom inside indexes like that one. True, many ebooks have indexes tucked away at the end, but they’re rarely integrated with the text of the ebook. And they’re not often hyperlinkable, allowing the reader to jump right to a topic. They often just list page numbers instead, which makes no sense, as many e-readers don’t even display page numbers! This is a shame, because when you search for a word within an ebook, your Kindle or Nook should be able to use the index to help find exactly what you’re looking for. Instead of just looking for whenever a word appears inside the text, which is how e-readers do searches now, they should give first-class treatment to words in the index, rank those results higher.
    I think we’ll see this improve over time, as innovator-entrepreneurs build out the index feature. Some genres of content lend themselves better to having great indexes—travel guides come to mind. It’s hard to mourn the loss of an index—it’s sort of like grieving for an Excel spreadsheet—but the index is just as important for ebooks as for print books. And unlike print indexes, digital indexes can benefit from innovation.
    After all, it’s not hard to imagine a project that crowd-sources the creation of indexes. Such indexes could become collaborative experiences, ways of building community. We see similar bottom-up contributions on Wikipedia or on specialty wiki sites on the web, where fans lovingly edit content to help future fans. Wikis for Star Trek , Doctor Who , and Battlestar Galactica assiduously index each episode of every season’s TV show, introducing the places where new characters enter or old ones leave. The same could easily be done for ebooks, once e-reading platforms start to open up and allow collaborative access.
    That said, I’m not sure indexes will integrate in a fluid, seamless way with the Holodeck-style experiential books I wrote about earlier in this chapter. Earlier, I mused about which books can (and can’t) be made into immersive, experiential ones. As I said, I’m partial to the works of Borges and Coleridge, and I don’t think they’ll ever translate well into rich multimedia experiences—but what about you? Do you have any ineffable books, inscrutable plays, or downright diabolical short stories that you would feel proud to recommend online as examples of great writing that can never be made into immersive experiences?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/8.html

Igniting Readers at Last!
    How will readers engage with one another in the future? How will they engage with authors? And how far away is a future of direct reader-to-reader and reader-to-author engagement?
    Engagement takes many forms. For example, my aunt mails my dad a box of mystery books to read every month, books that she’s gone through and wants to share with him. My best friend burns audiobooks onto CDs and mails them to me. My girlfriend loaned me her favorite book when we first started