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

too, because being able to buy used ebooks means the author’s ideas and stories are kept in circulation longer. A book, once read, could be liberated from a Kindle or Nook and find another reader.
    The drawback to used ebooks—and the reason why so many retailers and publishers are against them—is that they might encourage book piracy.
    Piracy is possible for physical books, although to a much lesser extent. If a book is stolen from your house, it could be sold to a used bookstore, which in turn might resell it. But theft of physical books is rare, and it’s even rarer when a volume is resold and recognized—although that does happen. In 2010, experts at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, caught a thief who had stolen a first-edition Shakespeare volume from England ten years earlier. The thief had mutilated the book and ripped pages out, but it was still identifiable.
    It’s much harder to catch a digital book thief. Ebooks lack sophisticated watermarks or other identifying mechanisms, so one digital book looks a lot like another. This means that there’s no real way to identify whether a used ebook was resold after being rightfully purchased or illegally copied one or more times.
    In fact, because there’s no way to forensically differentiate a pirated ebook from a lawfully purchased one, the assumption is that any ebooks not sold by a major retailer must have been pirated. This taints the concept of used ebooks, which is unfortunate. At this point, used ebooks are presumed guilty of being pirated until proven innocent.
    I, for one, think we need used ebooks—but what about you? Would you buy a used ebook? Trade one with a friend? Do you wish you could donate some of your own ebooks to a library? Or do you feel ebooks are already priced well and that selling them for less would hurt the livelihoods of authors and publishers alike?
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Fanning the Flames of Revolution
    As retailers like Barnes & Noble and Apple entered the e-reader market, they created increased competition for Amazon. But more importantly, and more positively for Amazon, their success signaled that the ebook market was evolving from mere innovation to full-blown revolution.
    And because the ebook revolution is largely technical, the best measure by which to view it is the theory of the diffusion of innovation.
    Everett Rogers wrote a book called The Diffusion of Innovations , in which he describes the five phases that an innovation goes through as it makes its way through a population. These phases can be used to understand the way consumers approach any new innovation, such as cars or cell phones or computers. Each phase is represented by a group of adopters in the society.
    Statistically speaking, the first 2.5 percent of the population to adopt a new technology are called innovators. The next 13.5 percent are early adopters, and the next 34 percent are the early majority. If you add up these three groups of people, you get 50 percent, half the population. The remaining two groups are the late majority, which represents the next 34 percent and, finally, the laggards, with the final 16 percent.
    The labels for these five phases in the diffusion of innovation speak for themselves. But to roughly sum it up, the younger and wealthier you are, the more you tend to find yourself on the side of the innovators. The more risk-averse and traditional you are, the more you find yourself with the laggards. Your social status and education level often follow the same progression.
    These factors correlate time and time again with every invention that’s been studied using the theory of diffusion of innovation. In fact, innovators and early adopters are no longer the only ones who speak about the diffusion of innovation. The theory has become part of the arsenal of tools used by marketers and product managers when they dream up new business ideas or gadgets. Whether you, as a consumer, are aware of this is unimportant to the people who make and market products, because the theory of diffusion of innovation is as real to them as the law of diminishing returns and the 80/20 principle.
    Here are a few examples of how the diffusion of innovation works. It took eighty-three years from the time refrigerators were first available in the United States for them to be available to more than half the households, which finally happened in 1940. Flush toilets were invented later than refrigerators, but they took only