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

to be added afterward by hand in red ink by the patrons who bought the Bibles. They would hire artists to paint them in, the way we hire tattoo artists to illustrate our own bodies.
    New technology always starts out prematurely, but the early adopters adapt it as best as they can and learn how to shout to overcome the technology’s shortcomings. And once the technology matures, the old products begin to fade into the past. Wax cylinders are now fragile and falling apart. Every year, hundreds of these recordings get too brittle to play anymore or succumb to “vinegar syndrome,” where they turn to liquid. Fewer than 5 percent of the wax cylinders made before 1900 survive.
    In a hundred years, you might see print books about as often as you see wax cylinders now, which is to say, rarely. You’d be hard-pressed to find a wax cylinder now, even at an antique store. Print books will fade, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this. Likewise, though the horse and buggy was once the most popular form of mechanized transportation, buggies are now relegated to the lawns of old farms as decorations. And one day, if floating hover cars are ever invented, you’ll see Ford Mustangs and Toyota trucks abandoned outside those same farms to rust and weather. Technology has a way of shifting, and we’re an adaptable species. That’s our genius: we do adapt.
    The visit to the wax-cylinder library is unsettling to me. Though we now manufacture millions of Kindles and iPads every year, how many of them will survive in a hundred years to play ebooks or MP3 files? I know of companies with vaults where they archive old MP3 players and e-readers. I’ve been to these vaults, had the glass display cases unlocked for me, and had the opportunity to hold some of the first 1990s MP3 players in my hands.
    I’ve been to a private video-game museum in San Francisco and had the opportunity to play the original game of Pong and to play original Atari and Magnavox Odyssey console games. These aren’t antique salt shakers or silver spoons in your aunt’s curio cabinet. These are tech gadgets that are barely a decade or two old. And yet they’re already relics.
    In the second Back to the Future movie, there’s a prescient glimpse at the display window of an antique store, which has an original Apple Macintosh for sale. For moviegoers in 1989, it would have been no more than a joke to see the hot tech gadget of the year as an antique, but there’s a bigger question here about durability.
    You can still find old Linotype machines that were once used to set type for small-town newspapers, and even after a hundred years, they often work. They had no system software, no brittle silicon parts. Computers will fare less well over time. They rely on electromagnetic memory, which degrades over time, and on a limited number of spare parts available for repairs. For example, the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft of 1966 mapped the surface of the moon to help choose a landing site for the Apollo spacecraft, but once the mapping mission was done, the tape reels with their data were shelved.
    Forty years later, scientists realized how useful this data might be for future moon missions, but they found it was nearly impossible to reconstruct the equipment needed to play back those tapes. After years of scavenging through NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab warehouses, they managed to find four rare tape players. Between all four players, they were able to salvage enough parts to get one halfway working. By contacting the retired presidents of former moon-mission subcontractors, they found additional parts and a small trove of repair manuals that one of them had in his garage.
    What they lacked, though, was an understanding of the 1960s mindset—that is, how people in the era of the Lunar Orbiter thought. They lacked the implicit assumptions that 1960s engineers made and that were never recorded in the repair manuals, and they lacked knowledge of how information was coded and decoded onto those tapes. Information science had matured so much over forty years that it was nearly impossible to mentally travel back in time and think the way engineers did in a simpler time.
    This particular story has a happy ending. They leased an abandoned McDonald’s, set up shop inside, and deciphered the old tape reels like modern-day cuneiform tablets. And we now have stunning digital images of the moon at an unprecedented level of detail—from tapes made in 1966.
    The story is