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

bleaker for software, though. At least with hardware, tape reels, and aging wax cylinders, you have something to inspect and work with. It’s a lot harder with bits.
    A company in Watertown, Massachusetts, called Eastgate Systems seems to be the sole guardian of aging hypertexts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before the advent of the internet, these hypertexts were seen as the preeminent form of digital art. They combined text, image, and sound and often did it in a nonlinear way. Reading these hypertexts was a lot like life itself, in that once you made a choice, you were presented with more choices, and you could never go backward. It’s a technique that modern video games like Heavy Rain and Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors have rediscovered.
    The pinnacle of such hypertexts was a massive project called Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, which had to be loaded from several floppy disks and which contained programming that actually—and deliberately—caused your computer to crash. It was designed to make you aware of the medium with which you were interacting. It would be like the equivalent of seeing this page turn to eInk phosphors and then disappear once you read it, or like having a book whose pages could only turn forward, because the past got destroyed with every page turn.
    Sadly, while it’s possible to buy Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse , it’s nearly impossible to read it. You would need an aging Mac computer from around 1990 and a defunct program called HyperCard. Maybe Eastgate Systems will revivify these early hypertexts, which have since been overshadowed by the internet, and make them available on iPads one day. Who knows? But the point is that software does not fare as well as hardware.
    Media in our culture fares poorly in general, whether or not it’s digital.

Bookmark: Used Books
    There’s an enormous market now for used books—a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly puts it in the billions of dollars. Because this market is so big, it allows us as readers to either buy used books ourselves or read used books that have been donated to libraries.
    But there’s no such thing yet as a used ebook.
    All purchases are individual, and DRM makes sure that a book that you purchased can only be read on your own device. Of course, there’s a dark undernet for pirated ebooks. As an experiment, I searched the peer-to-peer networks for The New York Times bestsellers available this week in ebook format, and I found pirated versions of all of them, contributed by anonymous and technically sophisticated book lovers. And don’t doubt that these folks love books, even though they’re pirates.
    Still, though there’s no legally sanctioned and technologically functional used ebook market yet, it’s going to happen. I predict it will be started first by a company like Barnes & Noble that allows the resale of its ebooks through other websites—that is, third-party companies who will be able to sell ebooks to you at a discount perhaps, even though they buy the books directly from Barnes & Noble. There’s nothing strange about this reseller model. It’s used all the time for physical goods. I think the adoption of a reseller model for digital goods will open up a thriving used ebook market.
    Perhaps a time period from the original date of a book’s publication will have to pass, maybe a year or two, after which the book will be available as a used ebook sale. At that point, the ebook would be available at a reduced price.
    Or perhaps the laws of another country will allow used ebook sales, so you’ll end up going to an offshore website, like those that run legal online gambling sites, entities headquartered in Bermuda or Turks and Caicos. They’ll provide a marketplace for sellers and buyers, and these entities will take a small percent of each sale. They’ll be companies small enough to be run by one person, sitting in a beach chair in Bermuda and drinking a mai tai while his servers hum quietly in some nearby warehouse, raking in the cash and storing all the digital files.
    I think it would be healthy if we could have a used ebook market. There are even hopeful signs that it may be starting soon; in 2013, Amazon applied for a patent on the sale of used digital goods, including ebooks. Used books—and by extension, used ebooks—would help readers, because more books could be bought at cheaper prices. This lets a reader get more bang from his or her buck. And it would help authors