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

that’s true all around the world.
    Book readers are mostly oblivious to these backdoor, underground conversations, because the content keeps flowing, and the struggles behind the scenes are just part of business as usual. But they are struggles for everyone in publishing.
    You see, most everyone in publishing came into it with an arts background, a degree in writing. These are people who have read Homer and Aeschylus, who can tell the difference between a simile and a metaphor. They can spot a good book when they see one. But nothing in college prepared them for these blood-elevating, stress-inducing fistfights with words.
    They came to publishing because of their love of words and their love of language, because of that imaginative faculty we all possess that somehow switches on when we’re immersed in a book—when the real world peels away like an ugly scab and we’re left with fresh new skin underneath, entranced by this imaginative new world. Maybe that’s what kept us going through all those negotiations at trade shows like BookExpo America.
    When it was all done, everyone would smile through thin lips and shake hands, and there’d be an invitation to a party at the Flatiron Building, where everyone would get drunk together with Whoopi Goldberg and Spiderman. All these publishing executives would party with actors and authors and swill manhattans as if Tuesday was the new Friday, but they’d come back to those underground conference rooms the next day, their hangovers pounding in their heads and their fists pounding on the conference-room tables. We reenacted this ritual every year out of misguided self-interest. But if we didn’t reenact this, books would have piled up at the publisher’s offices in Midtown Manhattan and you’d have had no way to buy your books.
    Even though books are moving to digital, events like BookExpo America are as strong as ever. Likewise, the American Concrete Institute still meets once a year at its main trade show, even though concrete is as old as the Roman Empire. Whenever industries are held together by relationships, you’ll still find people meeting every year. So we won’t see trade shows like BookExpo America fade or move entirely to chat-room windows on computers just because books are going digital. And especially not now, while the ebook revolution is in full swing and the relationships of key players are shifting on a near-daily basis.
    There’s a triad here between publisher, retailer, and author. Without any of these three, readers wouldn’t have any books to read. Authors write books, publishers package and print books, and retailers sell them. You can’t, for example, drive to Random House’s offices in Midtown Manhattan and ask to buy a copy of The Lost Symbol . They’re not going to sell it to you, and the security guards will chase you out. Nor can you drive to Dan Brown’s mansion and ask him for a copy. He has security guards too. Authors and publishers and retailers are in an intricate dance around one another, orbiting like stars in a triple-star system. It’s a complex, convoluted orbit, but this dance is ultimately for readers’ benefit.
    Publishers need readers. Gutenberg’s financiers sent envoys to trade shows in Florence and Paris. They went to promote his new Bibles and drum up pre-orders. We know this because in 1454, an envoy to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor traveled to Frankfurt for its annual fall fair. That year, the buzz was about a man with a new Bible on display that was “absolutely free from error and printed with extreme elegance.” According to the same envoy, “Buyers were said to be lined up even before the books were finished.”
    A year later, cardinals in the Catholic Church were trying to get copies of these remarkable Bibles, but they were sold out to monasteries, churches, and private buyers. So although I have an image of Gutenberg working in his sooty, sauerkraut-smelling workshop, using nothing but ink made by local manufacturers and paper from nearby forests and perhaps even lead and tin from mines right outside his city, commerce was still an outward, centripetal force in his world.
    In the early days of the printed book, publishers like Gutenberg served all three functions in the triad. In addition to printing and packaging the book, the publisher would often retail it by taking pre-orders or offering copies for sale to patrons afterward. Publishers were also often authors. Whether they took books