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

afield than the Yukon. The move is on to make ebooks work for non-Western languages, and it won’t be long before you see Chinese and Japanese content look really good on e-readers. Current e-readers were designed for an English-speaking audience, so there’s work to do to make the experience great in other languages. That’s why Apple and Amazon and all the others are setting up territorial outposts in other countries—in the Middle East and Latin America and Europe and Australia—all across the globe. Each of these companies is intent on establishing itself above the others as the premier player in ebooks and digital devices.
    The great game is now on in corporate conference rooms all over Silicon Valley, and anyone with any stake in ebooks and digital content is planning its company’s international expansions. Sony was first, another first for them, when they launched their e-reader in England and Germany and other European countries a full year before Amazon. But Amazon started to catch up by launching a dedicated UK device, as well as a universal Kindle that could be used in nearly every country with a 3G network, even on cruise ships out at sea.
    The drawback with the universal approach that both Sony and Amazon have taken is that the devices are still English-centric. All the menus and navigation items and user interfaces are in English, which limits the sales of such devices in other languages. Tablet devices are doing much better internationally because they don’t have hardware keyboards that need to be customized for each language.
    We’re going international with ebooks and written content in the same word-for-word way that print books once did.
    Printing the Bible bankrupted Gutenberg. His financiers repossessed the equipment, and with the collapse of his workshop and his numerous lawsuits and losses, his workers had no place to go but elsewhere in Europe. Within fifty years of the first printed book, there were printing presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, France, and England. There were printers flourishing in hundreds of different towns.
    As the printers spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, they cross-pollinated and learned from one another, much like tech workers in Silicon Valley today. It’s not just the ambience of Silicon Valley—with its sunny climate and wineries and badminton courts—that makes it so successful. No, the tech workers go from one company to the other, like bees from one flower to another, rapidly cross-pollinating all of Silicon Valley with everyone’s ideas.
    I see the same cross-pollination already happening with ebooks. I see the flux of executives from New York’s book-publishing world coming to Seattle and Silicon Valley. I see Apple people coming to Kindle, Kindle people coming to Sony, and Sony people spreading the idea-pollen further afield. It’s all incestuous and cross-fertilized, and now that ebooks have been launched, there are no more secrets. You’ll be seeing better and better products, and maybe they’ll be more humanistic too.
    Wealthy readers in the sixteenth century refused on principle to read printed books. They scorned these books because they seemed to lack the humanistic touch of an actual scribe’s hand and thought that the printing was too mechanical compared to the natural way a scribe’s hand would vary as he wrote out every word. They didn’t like the regularity or precision of the printed book and found it less authentic. Though it was cheaper than a handwritten book, the printed book was scorned so much that printers deliberately introduced defects in the fonts and varied them to make the book seem more irregular and less perfectly typeset.
    It was a smart innovation, and if a sixteenth-century MRI machine had existed, it would have shown them what we have now learned: that the subtle differences in script and style in a handwritten book are actually better for reading retention. That’s because the brain pauses more and the eyes dart around more frequently to disambiguate words, giving the brain more time as it labors over every word to retain its meaning.
    And yet, as we know, hand-printed books didn’t last long. How many handwritten books do you have in your own library? None? I thought so. And how many traditional print books do you expect to see in the average household a generation from now? None? Exactly.
    The shift in taste away from print to digital will mirror the shift