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

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    Ownership is already a difficult matter with digital possessions, because there’s nothing tangible. You can’t touch a bit or a byte. But you can at least store a digital copy of an ebook on a drive somewhere by backing it up. In fact, many people advocate doing such backups, even though Amazon and the others have secure copies of your content in their clouds. I think, however, that if publishers and retailers could get their way, you wouldn’t even have a digital file. Ebooks would simply be streamed, one page at a time, while you read. There would be no trace of them on your device afterward.
    This, after all, is how TV shows have historically worked. You just watch what comes over the airwaves. This is also how Netflix works. And it’s how music services like Spotify and Pandora work. Even the Google Book product works this way. It simply isn’t an option to save a local copy of a song or movie. It’s in the cloud, and all you’re able to do is rent the content. The same may soon be true with ebooks. All you may own are the rights to read a book but not to own a copy of the actual content.
    It’s a scary thought, with long-ranging implications—and in my opinion, few of them are for the best. We seem to be boomeranging back to the early days of broadcast media, to the time when radio and TV content were streamed over the airwaves and only rarely preserved on audiocassette or videotape.
    With this in mind, I think that companies like Google are smart to focus on content first. You can have the best e-reader, but if your content selection is lackluster, you’re just going to be a flash in the digital pan. You can be the talk of the town at the Consumer Electronics Show, the yearly trade show for gadgeteers in Las Vegas, but content is a long-tail proposition, and the accumulation of selection takes time. I know this from leading an ebooks team at Amazon. I know how long it takes to digitize all these books.
    Though Google got into the game late, you haven’t seen the last of them. Because although their strategy makes their results seem low key in the short-term, it positions them perfectly to drive and lead the next phase of reading, what I call Reading 2.0.

Bookmark: Bookshelves
    As a kid, I used to enjoy mock living rooms.
    The furniture stores of my youth seemed to sprawl on forever, with one mock room following another. Some were decorated in sleek 1980s decor, while others were warmer and more homey. It was an amazing experience to walk through a furniture store and go through one iteration of a room after the next. Endless foyers with endless opportunities for playing board games or watching TV.
    I remember the mock living rooms most because they all had bookshelves. I was drawn to the books, of course. Oddly, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why some titles were chosen over others for display in the rooms. The books were all hardcovers, as if even in these mock living rooms, it was important to demonstrate wealth and prestige, perhaps as a nod to the “libraries” of the wealthy, special rooms whose walls were ornamented with leather-bound books. In retrospect, the furniture stores likely bought the books by the pound.
    Today’s furniture stores are more sophisticated and even have cardboard cutouts of computers inside the mock living rooms. But books are still on the bookshelves of these rooms, as if they’re waiting for their owners to one day return and read them. Of course, the owners will never return home, since the furniture stores are simply aspirational galleries for homemakers. And yet, I’ve never once seen an e-reader inside a furniture-store showroom, mock or otherwise.
    Old habits die hard. And while books linger on in our cultural consciousness, so will bookshelves.
    Is the feeling of warmth we get from a well-stocked library or drawing room genuine, or is it simply something accultured into us? Would we feel just as cozy in front of a fireplace in a room bereft of everything but a Nook set alone on a pedestal? Clearly this feeling comes from our culture. We associate poverty with an empty environment and wealth with a richly appointed one. But can these perceptions change? Can we collectively become comfortable with simplicity and minimalism? Can nothingness become the new black, as they say in fashion circles?
    We’ve yet to see Swarovski-crystal Kindle cases or cashmere iPad protectors, but as ebooks penetrate into the echelons of the ultra-wealthy, you