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

can share an interesting passage from an ebook and our comments about it. Wherever we are and whenever we want, we can talk to others around the globe about a book, as if the world is our reading club and the author our best friend.
    When I said earlier that the Kindle was one of the two best inventions of the twenty-first century, I meant the concept of the Kindle, the concept of a portable e-reader and all the ebooks that can be read on it. I think that other devices since the original Kindle have vastly improved its basic features and added new ones. But they are all rooted in the Kindle. In terms of reading, the iPad owes as much to the Kindle as a smartphone owes to the humble rotary phone.
    Like the basic Kindle, current eInk e-readers still have a ways to go as actual gadgets. They may never truly compete with multifunction devices like the iPad or Google’s Nexus tablets or even the Kindle Fire released by Amazon. But what we have now is directionally indicative of a future that all book lovers should want to live in, the future of on-demand reading, of having any and every book that’s ever been published available to us no matter where we are.
    In fact, some books already exist only in electronic format and offer things that print books can’t, like the ability to be updated every few days. For a number of years, Kindle’s number-one bestseller was a guide to Kindle in ebook-only format by an author who self-published it with Amazon. The author, Stephen Windwalker, updated his book a couple of times a week. Purchasers could redownload the updates at no charge, so they could always have a fresh copy on hand.
    This is something that Walt Whitman dreamed about. He revised his greatest collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass , nine times in his lifetime, constantly editing and constantly changing the order of poems, adding new ones, and refreshing old ones. He printed this book time and time again at his own expense, which left him broke and barely able to support himself. Even when he was near death, he was only concerned with proofreading his “deathbed” edition. With ebooks, every author can be his or her own Walt Whitman, constantly reclaiming his or her own work by revising it and redistributing it.
    Admittedly, today’s distribution network for content updates needs to be improved. As a reader, for example, I have no way of knowing whether a new version of a given book is available on my e-reader. We need a distribution mechanism that works like blogs do to push out updates as they become available and then notify us of them. I’m thinking in particular of the way that the iPad and iPhone show a “badge” on the icon of every application to indicate if there’s an update or if I have new email or if someone tagged me on Facebook. The same idea could apply to ebook content.
    This is the great thing about where we are right now. I’m not speaking as a pie-in-the-sky futurist but as someone who sees technological inevitability. Nimble authors and publishers are able to move fast to take advantage of new ebook features—like animation, interactivity, live chat, location tracking, quizzes, and recipe calculators—that are gradually being added on top of existing features. People in publishing who are smart enough to leap on this accumulation of features are finding themselves with hits, because these features aren’t just snazzy eye candy to the digerati, passing memes of the day that get touted in the blogosphere and in some article in Wired magazine. These features work because that’s how people want to consume information, and they want it all in one convenient package.
    But this can only happen if authors and their publishers fully embrace the potential that the ebook revolution presents. I’d like to say that all of them have the potential to grasp it. But as I traveled the country, meeting with publishers, authors, and others to evangelize for Kindle, I began to see that this was not true. Some did not get it at all, and you could sense it in everything they said and did about ebooks. But thankfully, others did. These are the companies that I think will not only survive but thrive in the world after the revolution, while the others will look around in wonder at how quickly their once-mighty empires fell.

Bookmark: Inscriptions
    I was a bookish kid. I’d blow my weekly allowance at a bookstore at the local mall every Saturday. That’s when the mall’s courts and hallways were occupied