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

printing ebooks onto paper and binding them as regular old books.
    I can imagine a retro company in Portland or Brooklyn doing this, a company run by hipsters in prim mustaches and fedoras, a boutique company that prints ebooks onto paper in the same way that other Brooklyn boutiques publish print magazines as clay tablets.
    Each family has its own story, often partly inscribed in the pages of its books. Does your family have a book with an important inscription? A family Bible? Is a chapter of your own history preserved between the brittle pages of an old book? Care to share your story?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/11.html

Innovators and Laggards: The New Face of Publishing
    The biggest revolutionaries in the ebook revolution aren’t the retailers or authors—or even the publishers. They’re the readers, the ones who took a leap of faith and bought the first Kindles or who plunked down six hundred dollars on the first iPads. They’re the innovators and early adopters who told their friends and families how good ebooks were, how readable they were, and who bought up ebooks like crazy.
    You have to ask yourself, of course, why people bought ebooks in the first place. To be fair, e-readers are sexy, and they’re great gadgets. And when innovators get their hands on a great new gadget, there’s often a lot of cachet that goes with it, which others adopt. You see the same thing all the time in fashion design and technology—this trickle-down effect of social mores and conventions, fads, trends, and gadgets. But one thing that is different about ebooks is what I call “reader’s guilt.”
    While MP3 players and airplane-friendly DVD players are neat, most of the music or videos we consume are for entertainment purposes. But books are different. You spent years with them in school. You’ve likely been taught how important they are, and you suspect in a kind of hangdog, guilty way that you should be reading more often than you really do. That’s reader’s guilt. And that’s partly why some users—maybe even you—voraciously buy ebooks. You feel like you ought to. This nagging, guilty feeling may encourage you to give in and buy a Nook.
    And let’s face it, we have every right to feel guilty for not reading as much as we ought to. According to studies funded by the National Education Association and publisher advocacy groups, the U.S. population is fragmented into two equal groups: half the population reads, and the rest don’t read. We’re a nation of readers and nonreaders. According to these studies, 33 percent of high school graduates who don’t go on to college never read another book for the rest of their lives, and 42 percent of college graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Sadly, 80 percent of U.S. families didn’t buy or read any books last year.
    These numbers scare publishers, of course.
    When it comes to ebooks, there are two kinds of publishers: innovators and laggards. During my time as Kindle’s technology evangelist, I met plenty of both.
    In my travels, I found that, in general, the most innovative, flexible, and successful publishers in the book market were the small and midsized ones. They’re the ones that have the most to gain, the ones that are willing to take the largest risks. But they’re not so small that taking a risk with technology will bankrupt them. I’m thinking in particular about my own publisher, Sourcebooks, a company I first visited years ago when I was managing Amazon’s audio and video ebooks.
    Sourcebooks was the first publisher to include CDs and DVDs with their print books, bundled as companions to the content. The idea that you could read the poetry of Sylvia Plath or T.S. Eliot and also hear them reciting their own poetry caused a stir when it was first launched ten years ago. Not only was Sourcebooks first to combine text and audio in print, but they also were the first to make the same move with ebooks. I remember working with them to get recordings of poetry slams digitized or videos by Johnny Cash that could be embedded and then seen in an ebook as it was read.
    Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah runs the company with as much attention to detail as Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. And yet, unlike them, she’s nimble enough to adapt quickly and seek inspiration where she least expects it. She’s brazen and no-nonsense, the kind of person who’d run a saloon in the Wild West gold rush of ebooks. (Full disclosure: because of their