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

inspiration—aren’t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain ebooks that lag by at least ninety years. Social mores have changed. We no longer say “twenty-three skidoo,” for example. Much of the searchable ebook content is culturally irrelevant, and that which is relevant is hidden.
    By preventing ebook content from showing up in the results of internet searches, we’re missing out on some great information. This is most true for nonfiction. Even newspaper and magazine publishers are smart enough to put their content online where it’s relevant—but not book publishers. It will take a tidal shift, a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models, before this happens. That is sad and short-sighted, in my opinion, because it means that instead of getting expert facts from within books written by professionals, we’re getting misinformation and novice opinions when we perform certain kinds of web searches.
    For example, “Is creatine powder healthy when exercising?” or “Can I have caffeine when I’m pregnant?” No public-domain 1920s self-help book offers answers to these questions, because words like “creatine” or “caffeine” were not used in these contexts then. But there are hundreds of chat rooms and forums with wildly diverging amateur answers. Publishers would perhaps argue that this information is valuable and that I should just buy the book and read it. True, but how do I even know which book to buy? If ebooks were universally searchable on the web, I’d at least know which one to buy. As it is now, I don’t.
    I’m not worried, though. This will shift, in time, as surely as language itself. Publishers will relax their objections to making content searchable, and retailers like Amazon and Google will quickly step in to enable this feature. And then we’ll be reunited with the words we’ve been speaking all along.

Bookmark: Dog-Eared Pages
    A month before I started working at Amazon, I was in Kansas City, the home of a great old-fashioned, retro-modern printer called Hammerpress. It is part of the vibrant Kansas City arts scene. On the first Friday of every month in summer, all the streets are full of barbeque and ice cream stalls and the art stores and studios open for you to meet with the artists.
    When I was there, Hammerpress handed out some bookmarks. These wonderful strips of thick card-stock had been printed using old-time Western fonts and crazy dingbats of the moon and sun and tombstones in black and gold inks. And even though I think bookmarks are as archaic as business cards, I still use them when I read my print books.
    Sadly, there’s nothing quite so spectacular and well-designed to use when I digitally bookmark my current page. In fact, most of the time, I don’t bother bookmarking my digital reading anymore. When I leave a Nook book and continue reading it hours or days later, it knows where I left off, so there’s simply no need for bookmarking. Nonetheless, if I wanted to digitally bookmark it, I still could—and sure enough, you see the upper right-hand corner of the screen fold over, dog-earing the page.
    There’s no such thing as a personalized digital bookmark, though. But then, you could argue that such bookmarks were gimmicky in the print world anyway, just opportunities for salesmen to sell you adjuncts to your reading life that you never needed. Hammerpress will keep doing fine. They make music posters for bands like Yo La Tengo and are not in it for the bookmarks. I don’t know any company that is. It’s a sensitive soul indeed who will shed a tear for the death of the printed bookmark.
    This type of demise has always happened as one technology replaces another. I have to admit that, as a bookish antiquarian and collector, I am sensitive to the passage of these older technologies. But as much as I would love to send a pneumatic tube with a love note inside it to my girlfriend, I know it’s impractical and I use email instead.
    Still, the humble bookmark could be reinvigorated. Life could be breathed back into it. Instead of appropriating old print metaphors—a dog-eared page—why not reinvent the bookmark? Why not treat it as something at once digital and alive? If the purpose of a bookmark is to remind you of where you are in a given book, then broaden its purpose. Let it act as an agent of your other reminders and to-dos and calendars. Make it an agent of sorts with access to your personal schedule.