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

worry about backing it up, because I know that Amazon or Apple or Barnes & Noble or any other digital bookseller will do it for me. They’re in the cloud.
    Of course, I still back it up anyway, because I’m fundamentally paranoid about digital content, and you never know, Amazon or Apple or Barnes & Noble may one day go out of business. It’s happened before to companies large and small. The great East India Company, once one of the most powerful companies in the world, went defunct in 1874 after almost three hundred years in operation. If you take the long view of history, it’s statistically inevitable that Amazon and Apple and other ebook retailers will founder one day. Anyway, with the cheap price of hard drives these days, I can back up my digital library for less than ten dollars.
    And if I forget for a week or a month to back up my ebooks, I can still rest easy knowing that they’re in the cloud.
    There’s that word again: cloud . What’s a cloud? Where is it? Where are your ebooks, and how do you get them back if your device breaks?
    I remember when I first discovered the cut-and-paste functions on a computer, when I was a child. All of a sudden, I learned that you could highlight text and cut it out, but it was still there somewhere. It was floating around in the ether, but in a way you couldn’t touch unless you knew the magic incantation, which was the paste command. It’s a magical concept, this invisible buffer that holds a couple of words or something as big as a whole story and lets you reposition it at will wherever you want.
    The cloud, as we know it now, is the same concept but vastly, vastly bigger. And there’s not just one. Just like nature with its thunderclouds and puffy white clouds and tornados, Google and Amazon have their own kinds of clouds, and Apple and others do, as well.
    Digital clouds are housed in rooms the size of football stadiums that are full of servers, racks of them from the height of your knees to your head, cabinets of computers with screaming fans strained to the breaking point. There are miles and miles of corridors of them in just one building, and often more corridors of them sprawling out into different buildings.
    I’ve been to Amazon’s data centers, seen its cloud, walked down its aisles, and had my hair tossed around by the windstorm of exhaust from all these spinning fans. The whirr and hum of hard drives and fans keep the clouds alive. IBM’s cloud has servers so hot that they’re cooled by water pumped through pipes deep inside these computers to cool off all their cores.
    Clouds are in these massive, windowless buildings, often built near rivers so they can be powered by hydroelectric dams. Whole rivers drain and flow to power these clouds. Clouds use more electricity per day than some developing nations in Africa do in more than a year.
    These clouds are the warehouses of our digital content. Whether it’s Apple’s cloud in North Carolina or Amazon’s in Virginia, they’re always on, ready at the drop of a hat to send you content unimaginably fast. These clouds are connected by massive data pipes of fiber-optic cable to the outside world, to let requests for data in and to pump massive volumes of data out. They’re like rivers in their own rights, muddy torrents gushing MP3 files and ebooks.
    Clouds are the new libraries. In a digital world, there’s no need to put content on shelves. When Amazon sells you an ebook, it’s not sitting on a shelf. Digital inventory is totally different from physical inventory. You either have an infinite amount of digital inventory, or you have none at all. As long as a company like Sony has the rights to sell an ebook, it never has to worry about running out of copies. The ebook is in their cloud forever, ready to sell fresh to new customers or to send down to a device if your copy of the book is accidentally deleted.
    Our cloud-connected gizmos let us do this amazing dance with content. If your gizmo is about to die, you can always buy a new one and transfer content from the cloud into your new gadget. It’s sort of like in the movie Being John Malkovich , where people were able to live forever by moving into a new body. Any number of our gizmos can die, but as long as the cloud persists, our culture continues.
    When I visited one of Google’s data centers, which holds their own ebook cloud, I was amazed. Even though I’d seen these types of buildings before, it was like that scene at the end of the