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

may see gold-plated styluses and Kindle chargers with prongs made from polished rock from the top of Mount Everest or Mars. Then again, perhaps we will come to appreciate the austerity of style that the cloud brings. If all your ebooks are a download away in the cloud, why display them ostentatiously?
    Cicero said that a home without books is a body without a soul. So what does that mean now as we start to relegate our bookshelves to our garages or sell them off at yard sales? Do we not have souls? What does it mean to our spiritual lives if we stop accumulating physical books, these printed volumes that once graced our lives? Are we going to have vast, ornate Edwardian mahogany bookshelves with just a Kindle or Sony e-reader or Apple iPad by itself on one shelf?
    As digital goods, books are just pieces of media now, like TV shows and movies and songs and apps, there on a skeuomorphic, digital simulation of a bookshelf on an iPad. “Skeuomorphic” is the word for a design philosophy that Apple, in particular, believes in. It’s a philosophy of ornamenting the digital with useless and irrelevant aspects of the physical goods they were copied from. For example, on Apple’s iCal product, you can see a leatherette blotter to make the digital calendar seem more like a physical one. Likewise, in Apple’s iBooks app, the whorls and burls of wood on a bookshelf have been replaced by a digital texture.
    The move toward digital books democratizes fashion and style. It’s no longer necessary to buy teak bookshelves, no longer necessary to display your books in a place of pride in your home. Bookshelves are being relegated to that great consignment shop in the sky, where you can also find CD towers, videotape cabinets, decorative typewriter-ribbon canisters, and home darkrooms for processing 35mm film.
    Of course, on the flip side, doing away with bookshelves is another nail in the coffin for books, as relics of an elite aristocratic age when we judged one another by what we read. As homes lose their bookshelves, books lose their elite status. In fact, we all lose.
    Surprisingly, as a culture, we seem to be okay with this. But what do you think?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/13.html

Google: A Facebook for Books?
    When I speak of Reading 2.0, I’m using a metaphor from Silicon Valley. The first release of a software product is Version 1.0, the second is 2.0, and so on.
    Reading 1.0 is the experience we’re all familiar with: reading a print book from the title page to the author bio at the back. That experience hasn’t changed much in thousands of years, not even since Gutenberg’s printing press. Reading is still a linear experience, a static experience. Whether you read a clay tablet or a scroll, you read in one direction—from the start to the end of the text.
    But now, we’re at the threshold of Reading 2.0, a seismic shift, because with this development, reading is no longer linear, no longer static.
    Although the idea of nonlinear, weblike reading was discussed as early as 1945 by Vannevar Bush, a computer theorist at MIT, it wasn’t until the advent of hypertext and the web in the late 1980s and early 1990s that we saw the first glimmering of this new form, where we could jump around within a book or in a collection of them.
    Now, we already understand that ebooks can be fluid. Their content can change seamlessly as they’re updated, as the author or the publisher sends down new changes to the text. But more importantly, the texts themselves could be collections of other texts that are constantly changing. Reading could become dynamic.
    The reading experience could become more social too. Ebooks allow you to interact with other readers. You can’t look at a print book and see who else is reading it and then tap their names to tweet with them about your favorite plotlines or passages. But you could with ebooks.
    With all its cross-linked books, Google may be on the verge of making Reading 2.0 possible. They may do it in a number of ways. But my hope and suggestion is that they do so through an idea I have, which I call “the Facebook for Books.”
    You see, I believe there’s ultimately only one book. All books, digital and physical, are part of this one book. No book exists in a vacuum. Even a book of fiction like The Lost Symbol mentions outside references. All books are linked in this tangle of intertwining roots, which you can think of as hyperlinks.
    In the future, there’s going to be just one book,