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

by people selling secondhand books. They’d set up shop in front of the comic store and the Orange Julius store, not far from the Spaceport Arcade, where you could always hear the eight-bit battle cries of Donkey Kong. Because the books were used, they were often cheap. Hours after entering the mall, I’d emerge into daylight again with a stuffed knapsack, sometimes too heavy for me to carry on my back. I’d drag it along the sidewalk to my mom’s car like a refugee fleeing a burning library, ash and sparks in the wind behind me, determined to save as much culture as I could.
    Among all these books, I’d often find inscriptions on the first or second page to boys and girls I’d never met from aunts and uncles of all stripes and sizes. The inscriptions were often inked—sometimes with a bold hand, sometimes a frail one—and were usually to commemorate an event. A birthday, an anniversary, or (more darkly) a divorce or bereavement.
    Inscriptions are a more personal, lasting kind of autograph. When an author autographs your book, he’s often sitting at a table at a book-signing event, working in a rote, mechanical way and hoping to sell enough books by the end of the day to justify his time. It’s vaguely mercantile. But inscriptions are the life-soul of families and can often last longer than the families themselves.
    For example, there’s a collection of inscribed Bibles at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Stuck in Dallas for a day due to a long layover, I chanced a trip to SMU and was lucky to peruse its carefully preserved Bibles and see the aging ink in them. Some of these Bibles date back to the 1700s and served in their time as birth records. Frontier families in Texas recorded the names and birth dates of their children, generation after generation. The Bibles give a sense of frontier life, of families living far from hospitals and churches, far from the society of anything but cattle and wolves and the hope for a better life in days to come.
    Humble inscriptions are important parts of family history. And yet, if and when my own descendants try to reconstruct their family tree, they’ll be stumped by digital books. Because you see, digital books can’t have inscriptions. I can’t give my girlfriend a digital book and write a note on the front page. Digital books are an extinction event for inscriptions. It’s like what happened with the dinosaurs. Though they ruled the world, once the extinction event happened 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs died off, and there were no more dinosaur bones in the fossil record. Thus it is with digital books. In the digital fossil record, there won’t be any more traces of inscriptions.
    It’s almost impossible to trace the life history of a digital good. If you download music illegally from the internet, you have no way of knowing who else owned the music file. It could have changed hands a thousand times, ricocheting from Russia to Serbia to France to the United States, from PC to Mac, from one BitTorrent client to another. Despite its travel, the file is still pristine, original, and untrammeled.
    Imagine what a digital passport would look like if it could accompany such a file, stamped and counter-stamped with so many international visas! Unless you crack the file open and re-author it, you can’t put your mark on a digital good. Could you modify an ebook and inscribe it? Yes. Assuming you can crack the ebook open, you can use any number of tools to add a page to an ebook, but doing so is a hurdle. Actually, it’s more like trying to jump over a hurdle while racing uphill in a clown suit and scuba flippers. It’s so hard as to make the effort pointless.
    I think we’ve lost something with ebooks in not being able to inscribe them or trace their histories. We’ve lost a way of learning about ourselves and our families. But then, perhaps this loss is compensated for by the rise in social networks, where one day your great-grandkids will be able to download all your tweets and Facebook posts.
    Will there be tools to allow you to inscribe ebooks one day? If so, they’ll need to be provided by the retailers and others who control the reading experience of books, and that means Apple, Amazon, and others. You’ll need to rely on these retailers staying in business so that the inscriptions you author stay in their clouds. Once these clouds collapse, the inscriptions will likely be lost forever, unless a company one day provides the service of