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

dating as something of a test—as a way of gauging my personality by whether I liked the book. The act of sharing a book is a close connection, often as close as a touch and perhaps more intimate.
    You can share digital books, but the experience is less warm than when you hand over your favorite paperback. You won’t connect with your friend or loved one over the same cover and talk about the same dog-eared pages.
    Digital book lending is swift and soulless right now. At least two retailers offer this feature. It’s a testament to Barnes & Noble that they were the first to offer this, that they understand the connection one reader has with another through a loved book that’s shared between them—because it’s Barnes & Noble, after all, that encourages people to get together in their stores and read books on comfy chairs and that hosts book discussion groups that gather like-minded friends of the written word.
    The digital experience of book sharing has a long way to go, and it’s a bit crippled now. You get a soulless email from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and then the book magically appears on your device the next time you’re within wireless range. Like much in the world of digital books, it’s a bit clinical, designed by technologists instead of humanists. But it works, with the benefit that you no longer have to worry about your friend holding on to the book for years and neglecting to return it to you.
    When I first started dating my girlfriend and she loaned me her favorite novel, I accidentally ripped the cover off it while reading. That almost ended our relationship right then and there! With ebooks, there’s no damage and no worry. The ebook boomerangs back to you after two weeks. That’s a lifesaver and a relationship saver.
    Ebook sharing demands to be more personalized, though. It should be as personal as sitting with friends in a café or someone’s living room. Ebook sharing needs a major innovation that breaks through the glass of Kindles and iPads, shattering the wall between readers. This needs to be something immersive, like perhaps video windows, to provide joint experiences where all the readers are in the same room. This is what we’re really looking for when we share a book with a loved one—a connection with that person. We send the book’s author out as an emissary and hope to connect over his or her words.
    In a way, we need to combine book sharing with book clubs.
    The great potential for ebooks is that they can give you the opportunity to share and discuss a given book not just with your nearest neighbors, but with people in distant cities and even distant countries. You’ll have an opportunity to talk to them within the book, face to face perhaps, like with the iPad’s front-facing camera. You’ll have opportunities to become part of social networks that will emerge from the book itself after being inspired by it.
    Perhaps Amazon or Apple will acquire a social network of their own and create “channels” within the network, one for each book. This way, there will be a conduit for discussion built right into the reading experience. Perhaps these channels will be moderated by passionate enthusiasts of each book. Members will contribute discussion topics, and perhaps there will even be opportunities for the author herself to jump in and become part of the book circle, available for question-and-answer sessions.
    Of course, as with everything socially networked, you’re going to eventually see these sites infested by ads and spam, by digital cockroaches you can’t quite kill.
    Retailers and publishers are currently building out features for the socialization of content through book sharing and book clubs. Retailers benefit from having these features, because they allow content to go more viral and spread through the social networks of the readers. As it is, you can already Facebook and tweet about passages inside digital books. But before long, we’ll start to have conversations on the pages with other readers—and perhaps with authors, as well.
    I know of at least two publishers that offer the ability for early readers of a book to directly contribute to the editorial process. Readers can comment on which pages work and don’t work, and if the author is receptive to their feedback, then the next version of the book can incorporate the readers’ suggestions. This is a useful process for shaping an author’s manuscript as it moves out of the publisher’s editorial