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

splurts of hardened metal on the floor and rows of metal slugs. With a word as soft and slippery as “slug,” it’s hard to imagine them being made out of metal, but a slug is a line of type made from copper, all the letters neatly arranged and ready to be inked for printing.
    In my mind, the workshop would be divided into sections for casting molten metal, for pressing it into paper with ink, and for the racks of moveable type that could be maneuvered into place to set each line by laborious line for whatever was being printed at the time. In Gutenberg’s day, it was too expensive to print an entire page of a book from one copper plate, which is how they did it at the newspaper when I was a child.
    Copper was only affordable enough for Gutenberg to do one line of type at a time. He could set a line and then disassemble the letters and words once that line was printed. If he needed to print more of the same Bibles or books, they would have to be hand-set from scratch, page by page, all over again. But it was the most he could afford.
    It was a dark and secretive workshop, just as secretive as any tech company today, for fear of outsiders stealing this brilliant idea. Even in the 1450s, secrecy was paramount. It was an age before patent law, and innovators had no other way to protect themselves besides confidentiality. There was talk at the time that the English and Dutch were developing their own printing presses, and Gutenberg had to be careful. So all the Germans in his workshop huddled together and kept their knowledge and books secret within the fortress of its walls.
    Amazon, Apple, and Google are a bit like medieval fortresses in their own ways. They’re secretive like China or Japan before they were opened up to Westerners, or like Tibet or Mecca, closed to foreigners, with rare exceptions like Sir Richard Burton, an explorer who dressed like a local and sneaked inside with his binoculars and surveying rods. In a way, it’s appropriate to speak of Amazon and other ebook companies in a medieval sense, because although ebooks seem so advanced, we’re really just emerging from the Dark Ages of reading today.
    Gutenberg was just as obsessive as Steve Jobs of Apple or Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He is known to have spent months worrying about how many lines of text should be printed on one page and varying the number to find the optimal balance between cost and aesthetics. By increasing the number of lines, he could reduce the number of pages that needed to be printed, but this made the book more difficult to read.
    Interestingly, I’ve seen the same situation play out in Amazon’s conference rooms. I’ve been in meetings with Jeff and his vice presidents where he obsessed about the number of lines that would appear on the Kindle screen. I’ve seen his 3:00 a.m. emails after those meetings. I’ve seen his mind wriggle and squirm just as obsessively as Gutenberg’s, and about the same feature. It’s as if we had to reinvent printing during the ebook revolution, and men like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt were Gutenberg’s ghosts, reincarnated hundreds of years later.
    It’s still amazing to me that a billionaire like Jeff—with an enormous business empire and a company that makes rocketships, no less—would take hours out of his life to obsess about line spacing, of all things! But attention to detail matters. Revolutionary innovations and products live or die by such obsession—and I believe Jeff wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.
    Printing as we know it eventually emerged from the Dark Ages. The actual quantity of books produced during the early years was relatively small—but with every decade afterward, books became cheaper as new technologies were introduced. Mezzotint. Offset printing. Lithographs. Electric typesetting. The mass-market paperback. And as literacy around the world increased decade by decade, more and more books came to be printed because there was an audience for them.
    With the advent of internet technologies like eBay and Amazon, it was possible by the late 1990s to find and acquire almost any book ever written (for a price, anyway). By the turn of the twenty-first century, we were practically flooded with printed books. Once the bulwarks of wealth and prestige, once gilded and bound in fine leather and placed behind glass cabinets in showy libraries and drawing rooms, books were now cheap commodities. You could go to any used bookstore