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

forty-three years before they reached everyone in the early majority. That accelerating trend has continued with more recent innovations. Home electricity took only twenty-two years before it reached half of all U.S. households. It took nineteen years for radio, fifteen years for TV, and only ten years for the World Wide Web.
    As we move further into the future, the diffusion of innovation happens faster. You don’t have to take my word for this; any study of the diffusion of innovation shows the same progression of this acceleration of culture throughout history. Perhaps this acceleration is caused by the explosion in innovations than can be reassembled to make still more new innovations. The acceleration can be bewildering if you’re unable to keep pace with it. To this day, my grandmother still refuses to use email, and whenever she has anything important to send, she uses a fax.
    When are ebooks likely to reach the early majority? Taking a conservative approach and assuming that will take ten years (the same amount of time it took for the internet to reach the early majority), that puts us squarely in 2016, ten years after Sony launched its first e-reader in the United States. I personally think it’ll happen faster, because I’m not conservative, and I see the acceleration of adoption rates across innovations. But even if the conservative estimate is right, half the people who read will have an e-reader of some sort by 2016—and possibly a year or so earlier.
    By the early majority phase, you’re at the sweet spot in the rate of adoption, when the most consistent growth is happening from year to year. My numbers tell me that’s where we are now—with the population of readers in the United States, at least. A 2012 report by Simba Information indicates that 24.5 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves ebook readers, and a 2012 Pew Internet study suggests that 33 percent of people in the United States own an e-reader or a tablet. The phase of the most rapid growth is happening now as reader revolutionaries are taking to the streets and subways with their e-readers. As trendsetters and early adopters, they’re being seen, and their ebook reading habits are being copied by others. Ebook-only content is helping the diffusion, as well. The ebook revolution is a bloodless revolution that spans all the acres of the imagination, across all of time and space to everywhere your imagination takes you while you read.
    Now, no one ever wrote a paean to flush toilets or refrigerators. No one rang a bell in 1950 during the heyday of the television, and no fireworks went off in 2001 when half the population found themselves on the internet. As far as I know, no one’s ever written a paean to a cell phone or even an ode to the humble wheel. But the invention of ebooks is different. It’s in a rarefied class almost all by itself, because it involves everything aspiring about the human spirit.
    The ebook revolution is ultimately about ideas, and in a very real way, we are our ideas. They’re the music that flows through our veins, the jolts of electricity that keep one day from blurring into the next. The revolution in reading has a tangible and noticeable effect on us as a population. The Simba Information report also suggests that a title originally only available as an ebook, Fifty Shades of Grey , may have been partially responsible for a 7 percent year-over-year shift in ebook reading in the U.S. population.
    Modern revolutions are more like microrevolutions. Modern political revolutions follow the same trend toward increased speed as innovations. The revolutions are instigated and completed faster than political revolutions of yore. This is related to the fact that we’re online with one another all the time. We’re a connected civilization, and this connection is accelerated more by ebooks than by flush toilets or refrigerators. We’re revolutionaries with one another because we’re linked by ideas, by currents that ripple through our civilization in the books we write and read.
    And it’s not just that we have more access to books now or that they’re available almost anywhere within sixty seconds. The ebook revolution also means that we can take what we’ve read, and the ideas that have been sparked, and then communicate them at lightning speed to people all over the world—whether through annotations on the ebook or highlights others can see or social network postings on Facebook or Twitter where we