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

traditional print books, but each “bookmark” also is a small interlude that describes the ways books have indelibly marked our lives and our culture of reading. These sections are at once sentimental and speculative and appear throughout the book like bookmarks between chapters.
    I will explain later in this book that I think there’s really just one book, the book of all human culture. I’ll describe what this one book might look like—as a sort of Facebook for Books, where all books can interact and link to one another in the same way that we ourselves are linked together on Facebook, as friends, coworkers, and family. We don’t have this singularly hyperlinked book yet, but in an effort to build it, I’ll invite you to talk with me and other readers throughout this book.
    At the end of each “bookmark,” you’ll see a link you can—and should!—click to continue the conversation online. And I do encourage you to click each link; it lets you into a social reading app that connects you (via Facebook or Twitter) with other readers, with me, and with surprises all along the way. This app is simple to install and unlocks the brave new world of what I call “Reading 2.0.” It’s a world that combines a conversation with the author, a virtual book club, and a thoughtful friend who brings you special notes and treats. Please note: the web page is an independent site maintained by me and is independent of this book’s publisher.
    Clicking the link at the end of each “bookmark” unlocks a sequence of surprises and gifts—starting with a personalized autograph, bonus chapters, unexpected objects falling out from between the “pages” of the book, ways to carry on the conversation with other readers, and a personalized message upon completing the book. You need to click each link to unlock all the surprises.
    I look forward to talking to you, because the greatest revolutionaries in the ebook revolution are the readers. We’re all part of this revolution, and we’re all mourning the culture of print books in our own ways. Everyone I talk to cares about the written word and has a strong opinion on where books are headed. Everyone has a story about books and ebooks and how they’ve changed our lives. So what’s your story? Click the link below to share it with me and other readers—and get your autograph too!
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/1.html

The History of Books
    If you’ve never used a Kindle, imagine a device the size of a book that can wirelessly download ebooks from Amazon’s online store. These ebooks can be read just like regular books—you can turn pages, add bookmarks, see the cover, and go to the table of contents. But unlike regular books, ebooks also let you resize the text to make it bigger or smaller. Ebooks let you look up a word right there on the page to see its definition. Kindles are part computer, part book, and part cloud.
    The packaging on the original Kindle box shows an illustrated history of the written word. Starting from the left-hand side, you see symbols in hieroglyphics and cuneiform, then you see Greek and Roman letters carved in stone, then woodblock medieval printing, finally followed on the right-hand side of the box by letters in modern alphabets on paper. The story of the written word is a story of evolution. In fact, the history of printing is one of a decline in durability and a rise in convenience.
    Printing started 6,000 years ago with cuneiform tablets from the Middle East. These were created from wedges carefully cut from mud, fired in a kiln, and made into tablets. The process had more in common with sculpture than writing, but it was durable. We’re still uncovering clay tablets from all over that region. I’d like to think that printing was invented to tell the stories of noble heroes and the elder goat-gods with their white beards, but no, most of these tablets were just bills and invoices. For example, in October 2012, an archive of 24,000 cuneiform business documents was found in central Turkey. It’s a 6,000-year-old hoard of checks, tax forms, and loan notes.
    Almost as old as clay tablets is papyrus, which is made from woven reeds like those that grow along the Nile. They’re not as durable as clay and gradually decay, although in the Egyptian desert, you can still find fragments of papyrus preserved by desert sands and dust through the subsequent millennia. As writing boomed, the supply of reeds started dwindling, and in the fifth century