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

talent for innovation, Sourcebooks was the first publisher that came to mind when it came time for me to pitch this book.)
    Based outside Chicago, Sourcebooks has three or four hands in different technology pies, building out enhanced ebooks that seamlessly integrate video and audio with reading and dazzling storytelling, as well as interactive children’s books that personalize the reading experience for each child.
    Bill, another innovative publisher I know, runs a company that makes travel guides. He totally gets the future of books, even though he seems like a classic old-school publisher. He enunciates clearly, thinks through every word and nuance, and speaks as if he learned rhetoric in college, clearly a dying art. I could sit for hours listening to him in his conference room, which is lined with travel guides to places as remote as Baja and Bali.
    I’m not sure what’s more exotic, all those travel guides and the worlds they represent, or this voice of grandeur from publishing’s past, when publishers were not only eloquent but understood their financial models and kept up to date with technology. That’s dizzyingly difficult and complex for most publishers today, considering how overwhelmed they are by all the new pricing models and gadgetry available.
    When I talk to Bill about the travel guides of the future and how reading will change, we agree that there will be guidebooks that blur the lines between reading about a place and experiencing it more tangibly, even from another location.
    Publishers like Dominique and Bill are looking at creating ebooks that are more like digital applications, because those ebooks can do more than traditional books or even regular ebooks. They see ebooks as interactive and engaging products, with enough narrative or nonfictional glue to bind everything together.
    These kinds of ebooks are expensive to make, so you’re not likely to see a lot of them, at least initially. Ebooks as applications are sexy, but like the sexiest of creatures, their beauty soon fades. What looks really hot now with all of its techno-trickery will, of necessity, become obsolete in a few years. That’s the way of applications. I challenge you to find a computer that will load and run software you bought ten or twenty years ago. Even if you could find the software in CD or downloadable form, the computer’s hardware and operating systems will have changed so much in the intervening years that you’d be hard-pressed to get the application running.
    This fast pace of innovation is a problem with technology in general. For example, I found a digital tape of some of the earliest writing I did as a kid, from when I’d visit my father’s newspaper and write stories on the newspaper mainframe. These stories were backed up onto tape spools, which I have now. But I’ve searched far and wide, and the only place I can find that has a working reader for this kind of tape is a computer museum in Germany for technology that was still working twenty years ago.
    Technology ages. Fast.
    The shelf life of an ebook application is only a few years at best. And an Android ebook app has a different kind of code than an Apple ebook app. They’re written in different languages, and you have to pay engineers tens of thousands of dollars to port them from one platform to another. Today’s hot application becomes yesterday’s fossil in the blink of an eye.
    Take a look at the fossils in the Burgess Shale Formation, a strip of ancient rock in the Canadian Rockies. These are fossils of creatures that lived 500 million years ago and can’t be found anymore on our planet. Some look like winged lobsters or walking accordions with poisonous spines, like manta rays with parrot’s beaks or five-eyed worms the size of elephant snouts. They’re creatures with body plans so bizarre and befuddling that we’d be terrified if we saw any of them crawling along the sidewalk. But it’s through these bizarre bursts of evolution that nature experiments and selects which creatures will survive and move into another era.
    Even so, I’m not faulting publishers in these halcyon, gold-rush days of ebooks for innovating and plunking down $50,000 or more to build each interactive ebook application (and that’s what they often cost). They’re expensive, and everyone from publisher to author tightens their belts on royalties to make these applications happen. But even if publishers don’t see immediate profit from ebook apps, the