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

on a weekend and see racks and racks of books sitting forlornly under an awning—a sad sight for a book lover.
    As a culture, we’re still very bookish, very literate, even though books are no longer the entertainment medium of choice they once were. And while it’s easier to collapse at the end of a hard day on your soft couch in front of your TV or laptop to watch your favorite show, there’s still a place for books in our lives, because they are the rawest and truest form for telling stories and collecting, analyzing, and communicating information and ideas. The beauty of books is that you approach them at your own pace. Not only can you read at your own speed, but you also can skip from section to section, nonlinearly.
    Of course, books have their limitations. They’re heavy. They’re hard to lug around on a vacation or pack in boxes whenever you move into a new home. Books are cumbersome, and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for in them. They can get out of date quickly. They age and mildew, rot and crumble.
    Those of a future generation will one day look back on printed books with the same benign and befuddled expressions that we use when we look at floppy disks or those colossal IBM mainframes with spinning reels of tape that you see in the background of the villain’s lair in James Bond movies. Books are bulky, and an individual book doesn’t hold much data compared to what an e-reader can hold.
    Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m a book lover: some of my best friends are books. But I see the limitations of books, and I see ebooks as their natural continuation. And yes, this means that one of the challenges we’re going to have as ebook readers is to accept that reading is a technology-based experience. That means the culture of reading will evolve and change like all technologies do. This might seem troubling to some, but remember that print technology has also evolved over the centuries. It simply had a 500-year head start, and there aren’t many evolutions left for it.
    By the time you and I started reading as kids, print was basically done evolving. But we’re still on the rapid exponential rise of technology’s evolution for ebooks. Also, as an insider in the publishing and retail worlds, I can tell you that you’re going to start seeing far more ebooks and fewer print books. Readers are migrating to digital, and ebooks are a more attractive financial proposition for publishers; the economics are simply better.
    Print books will, of course, still be published, but primarily for blockbusters, the kinds of books that will get lots of press, lots of advertising. Of course, there will also still be an attractive market for print books as collectibles, whether they’re antiquarian books or special-edition commemorative hardcovers. But ebooks will rule the day, and when people a few years from now talk about “books,” what they’ll really be referring to are ebooks, not print books. Eventually the “e” will be dropped, and books will be assumed to be digital, just as most music is now digital; after all, we don’t refer to music as e-music.
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    The future of books is fraught with possibilities and dangers. With ebooks, we’re no longer reading on paper but on eInk or LCD screens, and although each type of screen has its own technology, behind every e-reader is a hard drive of some sort, something that stores the books you read.
    Hard drives are the new clay tablets for books. The reason we love them so much is that they’re so cheap to manufacture, these thin wafers of silicon and circuitry that are often made without any moving parts. Hard drives are ridiculously convenient, and our civilization rests on them; the web itself is supported by air-conditioned data centers all around the globe, vast buildings where hives of hard drives hum away.
    Convenient, yes, but also prone to failure. The average hard drive has a 25 percent chance of dying after three years, so there are employees at Google’s and Amazon’s data centers who do nothing all day long but trundle down corridors with carts of replacement drives. Hard drives are convenient as long as you have anything that resembles a computer or cell phone or e-reader, but with the consequence that any content on them is likely to disappear fast as once-hot electrons grow cool, as magnetic fields flicker and fade.
    At least clay tablets were given the dignity of turning into dust, but when ebooks die, it’s without a