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

a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from any book and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading. It’s social networking, if you will, for books.
    For this to work, a critical mass of books will have to be digitized. That’s because there’s a network effect, a compounding effect. The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes. A small network will only have a few books and a few connections, while a rich network will be able to link in more. Having more links provides more pieces of the puzzle, more ways of seeing how one book influences or leads to another. And ultimately, readers will have more interesting reading experiences as they follow all these links.
    As a reader, you will have a richer appreciation of a book’s subject matter and different insights from multiple authors—sometimes contradictory—all just a click away and all of which give you a better appreciation of the whole. This kind of deep linking lets authors have a debate right on the page you’re reading, and you get to judge which author or which idea wins. The often-overlooked hyperlink can make this happen. I truly believe that the hyperlink was a twenty-first-century invention that was somehow discovered too early in the twentieth century, an invention we still haven’t managed to fully exploit.
    Google is in a great place to make this happen. They know search engines, and they can figure out how to continually process the content of all books to make these hyperlinks, so that all the references between books are intact and up to date.
    We can already see hyperlinks in the indexes and footnotes of science journals and nonfiction books, as one book bows its respectful head toward another and as one author acknowledges another. But those are just labels. They’re not yet working hyperlinks. Such bibliographies and footnotes could form the basis of explicit hyperlinks between books, although you can’t click on an entry in an ebook bibliography and go right to the destination. Not yet, at least.
    But sometimes these links are more implicit than explicit. As great as William Faulkner is, for example, his writing would be nothing if not for Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In fact, cultural and literary references abound in books. This book, for example, tips its hat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Battlestar Galactica , Samuel Beckett, Socrates, Neal Stephenson, and so many others.
    But as I say, there is only one book, the book of all human culture. It should be possible to seamlessly switch between books, as opportunity permits. For example, in an early chapter I wrote how the product code names from Kindle came from characters in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age . It should be possible to let readers seamlessly switch over to reading that book, right here, in the middle of this one. That’s how web browsing works, after all. If a book is compelling enough—as I hope this one is—then readers will come back after their jaunts and sojourns into other books.
    Not only are all books connected, but so also is all culture. It should be possible to create a link from this book into a related Battlestar Galactica episode—or at least to a clip from it to show its relationship to the current content you’re reading. There should be a hypertextual overlay across all media that lets a consumer flip from book to movie to comic book and back again, as often as the reader pleases, because there is only one book, the book of all human culture. And let me tell you, it’s a great book. But it’s so long that you’ll never finish reading it in your lifetime.
    This “one book” is something that we, as readers, would enjoy having, although retailers like Apple and Amazon might object to this—especially if retailers stand to make less money by selling subscriptions to the one book than they would by selling individual books. Publishers might also object to this one book, because they might not want to link their books to one another’s.
    That’s because publishers care about their brands. But let’s be honest: a publisher’s brand