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

perhaps one day the autograph will even be inserted right into the ebook itself as a permanent part of it. You’ll be able to buy special autographed editions, personalized just for you from your favorite authors. Keep an eye out for this over the next few years, as engineering catches up to innovation.
    But what do you think? Have you ever tried to get your Kindle or Nook signed? Do you have a collection of autographed books that is preventing you from making the digital transition? Are autographs worthwhile collectibles or afterthoughts best relegated to the digital dustbin? Click this link to get your autograph and join the conversation!
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/9.html

Wax Cylinders and Technological Obsolescence
    I’m wearing a white smock and white gloves, and the room is utterly silent. I’m guarded by two men, also in white smocks and gloves, who motion for me to sit down. They sit down beside me, one on either side of me. I can’t make a move without their permission, but I don’t want to make a move. This could be prison. But no, this is exactly where I want to be.
    The room has the sparse concrete emptiness of a police interrogation chamber, but it’s merely austere. It’s got the feeling of a clean room where even a speck of dust or a fallen strand of hair is seen as a holy horror, but it’s not a laboratory at Lab126 or anywhere within the curving, clean white halls of Apple in Cupertino. No, this is the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I came here to see what our future will look like.
    Here in the library, a massive digitization project has taken place. More than eight thousand original wax cylinders from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been digitized at this library. There are recordings here of Presidents William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt, original Sousa marches, and operatic arias sung by the Great Creatore. But the cylinders were made from wax and wood more than a hundred years ago. They’re fragile, and they’re falling apart fast.
    A librarian brings me an original wax cylinder to look at. The cylinder is fitted onto a phonograph, and a scratchy voice comes out of the horn for me to hear. It warbles with static and rises and falls as the cylinder rotates. It’s almost like you’re listening to the ocean, although you can hear a man’s voice in the background, as if he’s drowning in the sea of history and shouting distantly for help and recognition.
    There are strong parallels between the first e-readers and wax cylinders.
    When they came out, wax cylinders were amazing. They were the iPods of the 1890s. They let you listen to music at any time of day, something previously unavailable to anyone (except perhaps those who were wealthy enough to have their own string band commissioned and ready to play at all hours in their mansions or palaces). And yet when we look back on wax cylinders today, they seem primitive.
    In the same way, the amazing e-readers that launched the ebook revolution are just as primitive as wax cylinders. For example, when you listen to an old cylinder, you often hear an announcer describing the music that follows. The announcer is practically shouting at the top of his lungs to make himself heard. Recording technology was feeble in the 1890s, so you had to shout for your voice to be recorded. In a similar fashion, the first ebooks had no fonts and no bold or italic styles, and you had to WRITE IN UPPER CASE FOR EMPHASIS!
    The original Kindle was bare bones, as well. It basically only displayed black and white text, in just one font and in just six point sizes. The original Sony e-reader was just as bereft from a typographic point of view, and if you were given a choice between a print book and an ebook printed out on paper, you’d be challenged to choose the latter with its monotonous layout and over-simple style. At best, the text could have three different styles—regular, bold , or italic . Pictures were a bit of a novelty, even for Sony.
    This was originally true of print books as well, though. If you’re lucky enough to see one of Gutenberg’s Bibles in a museum, you’ll perhaps be especially impressed by the illustrations, by the flowing capital letters that start every paragraph, richly colored and unbelievably ornate. But they weren’t Gutenberg’s doing. His Bibles were actually bare-bones text. The illuminated letters, as well as the chapter headers, would have