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

feeling, whether it’s about a fiction book whose characters interest you or a nonfictional account whose ideas intrigue you and that you want to explore with others to make better sense of them.
    I don’t know whether physical bookstores will disappear in the digital revolution. But for the moment, thankfully, many of them seem able to hang on and maybe even thrive. I will be hoping that they continue to do so. But I also hope they learn from what the online retailers are doing. It’s not enough to keep selling books the same way as always. Bookstores will need to adapt and innovate just as much as any tech startup or nimble publisher.
    Bookstores are safe havens for intelligent minds and often are free from the tumult of street sounds and outside stress. Bookstores, especially casual independent ones, often have prowling cats, comfy couches, and the feeling that you could spend all day inside, in warmth and comfort. I’m sure you’ve passed many hours in the aisles of bookstores big and small, and if you’re like me, you have some favorites. Care to share any of yours?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/12.html

Our Books Are Moving to the Cloud
    I love my library.
    It’s big enough that it spans the three floors of my house. It’s not the fanciest library; it doesn’t have recycled tropical hardwood shelves or ornate display cases. There’s no bemused librarian sitting there ready to help me find what I’m looking for. In fact, a small warehouse would be more useful and save me from traipsing upstairs and downstairs all the time.
    This is why ebooks are so much easier for me. I can flick open my Kindle and search for a word and, within ten seconds, see the universe of content I have and all the books that mention the word I’m searching for. But this is just a scratch on the surface of what a universal digital library could be.
    Google comes closest to my ideal for a universal library. With Google, you’ve got an ever-expanding library right at your fingertips. Moreover, you can upload a list of all your books to Google and recreate your own personal library in Google’s cloud.
    Everyone in publishing and retail was looking forward with anticipation and anxiety to see what Google would finally do with its own ebook program when it launched in 2010. Would they introduce their own e-reader? Or a tablet? Or something completely new?
    Surprisingly, yet staying true to its roots, Google chose to go with a browser-based solution. Google is just dipping its feet in the water, just testing ebooks out. Theirs is a long-range approach. And ultimately, it is well positioned to take on some of the more long-range reading features that are necessary for the evolution of the book, in what I call “Reading 2.0,” because Google stores its ebooks in that most ethereal and powerful of places: the cloud.
    » » »
    While flying, I often read the in-flight magazine, which wants to sell me a robotic pooper-scooper, a talking garden gnome, a Wi-Fi-enabled pizza grill, New Age music for my cat, and a machine that will chew my food so I don’t have to. It’s like a Lucky magazine for the business-class traveler with time and money to waste. It will also sell me a CD shelf that can hold five hundred albums, even though the MP3 revolution is already ten years old and every album I own is digitized. Even my Baby Boomer parents have already converted their albums to MP3s!
    Why would I buy such a ridiculous shelf and waste space for it somewhere in my house? It’s so 1980s, as useless now in the twenty-first century as mullets, Izod shirts, and boom boxes. The same magazine wants to sell me a recycled tropical hardwood bookshelf for my books. But why spend more money than you need to, especially now that our books soar in the clouds, as weightless as a thimbleful of electrons?
    How big is an ebook? The question actually doesn’t make sense: a digital book is smaller than a fly, smaller than a microbe. It’s just an intermittent flicker of zeros and ones on a hard drive somewhere—on a cell phone, perhaps, or on a Kindle. And because a book is digital, you can make as many copies of it as you like, so you can easily back up your digital library in a few minutes.
    But if I were to have a fire in my house and lose all of my printed books, I would have to buy them all over again, one at a time. That would be difficult, since some are pretty much irreplaceable at this point. My digital book library is different. I don’t have to