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

process and into the world.
    By allowing early adopters to interact with the book, the author (and publisher) benefit from a higher-quality book, targeted better to what the readers want and expect. Likewise, the readers benefit. On the sites I know of, users can often buy the book at a discounted price because they were part of this editorial process. Both authors and readers are given incentives to engage. The only pity is that this process isn’t more widespread and isn’t yet built into the platforms of any ebook retailer. You have to be a diehard fan and sign up for this service on a publisher’s website.
    I’m certain this will change over time, though. Especially for nonfiction works, where the author and readers can refine the content of the book to clarify the subject and include topics that the readers really want to learn about. The author and the reader will spend more time collaborating and interacting.
    The concept of “authorship” itself, I suspect, will even blur and be diminished as books become shaped by readers themselves. In some ways, for some kinds of content at least, the author is often no more than a privileged reader herself. She can shape the material, but she often relies on conversations with other expert readers to find facts, elaborate on a point, or fill in missing pieces.
    We’ll start to see books being written and rewritten multiple times—with new endings or new twists or new characters—as the author and the audience engage digitally, something that can’t be done effectively with print books. True, you can release a new edition of a print book with an updated appendix and a new chapter perhaps, but in doing so, you often start a new conversation, rather than adding to an existing dialogue.
    A digital book will become like a chat room with a community around it. It could come to resemble an online video game, with readers all over the country having an intense online discussion or playing out the plot at the same time, wearing headphones and talking to one another over the internet in real time. Authors will move into the role of directors and orchestrators, and the audience will move into the role of the musicians. The readers will actually write many of the words. The author will choose the venue and shape the narrative in the same way that an Xbox game designer creates the playing field and core graphics that everyone else in the game gets to manipulate and use.
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    This is an interesting time for books, and there are many ideas in the wild, some of which will actually take root and grow. Many of these seeds will be grown under the care of retailers and under the guidance of publishers, but clearly, many of these seeds will be nurtured by others, such as startups that patch the cracks between what the publishers and retailers offer for ebook reading.
    I can see a totally different set of reading features than those we’re used to. A lot of these are social features—and let’s face it, we are a social species, a tribal people. Whether your tribe is your family, your school, or your work community, or an actual tribe such as the !Kung in the Kalahari, there’s something inborn about how social we are. Reading is a solitary act right now, an isolated interaction between one person and a book. The reading experience is at cross-purposes with our inborn impulse for sociability. So what better way to augment the reading experience than to bring social elements into it?
    It’s no stretch of the imagination to see people camping out on words or paragraphs within a book, carving out domains of expertise. People might do this for the same reason that Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest—because of the challenge, because it was there. Someone, for example, can become the expert on the nuances of meaning of this very sentence.
    Readers will camp out on a paragraph or sentence in an author’s book, staking it out as their turf and defending it when rivals want to squat on that turf with alternative interpretations. I can see people chatting with one another and coming together in conversations that are centered not just around the book, but around a given chapter or section of a book.
    Also, as you’re reading, you’ll see who else is reading, where they’re from, and what e-readers they’re using. You might decide to reach out to them and chat about this book or this section. The book might prompt you with some starter questions or conversational topics