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

most of all, because they’re convenient, downloadable to our devices in under sixty seconds.
    In fact, our habits for digital distractions and passive content consumption are putting us in danger of becoming a new species.
    I’m not saying that we’re going to become robotic Cylons. But we are in danger of becoming a species whose brains are wired totally differently than the humans who came before us. A species that can’t reason critically, can’t engage in active imagination, and can’t read into a mystery and figure out who murdered the butler before the novel ends. With the increasing interconnectedness that our devices afford us, this new species is likely to be much more social, like hyperactive orangutans on Facebook. I can’t say what this new rewired species is ultimately capable of. Socrates himself couldn’t say what the future of reading and writing would hold. He just rejected it wholesale.
    We don’t need to reject digital culture altogether. We just need to be careful. Stick to dedicated experiences and be wary of digital distractions. Set a time limit for the amount of time you or your children use in consuming media. Resist the impulse to tweet something every ten minutes. (It takes your brain at least twenty minutes to focus itself again after a distraction.)
    It’s easy to say that digital content is not a good thing, especially for a developing child. I myself once believed this. But now I think this is overly simplistic. If you’re objecting to the new merely because it’s new, you become an old stick-in-the-mud like Socrates.
    Just as there was a gap between oral and written cultures in the generation between Socrates and Plato, there’s a gap now between analog and digital cultures. All of us sit squarely between both analog and digital cultures. We were raised on TV and print books, but we also had computers and the internet. We see the allure of the digital culture but still remember what it was like to use public pay phones. We’re hybrids. Neither fully analog nor fully digital, we’re able to pause on the brink of this digital gap and look fondly back to phonebooks and pennies and other ephemera of an analog era. But now we turn toward the digital future, toward credit cards instead of cash and ebooks instead of print. The digital culture is upon us, and our children will be the heirs to a fully digital culture.
    What will the future of education hold?
    It’s more than simply taking old print metaphors and making them digital. The future of education isn’t about virtual blackboards or playing learning games as a kind of digital recess. I actually think we’re going to see more social elements in education. And let’s just accept the inevitable: social networks like Facebook and Twitter will be available for children at some point soon.
    So why not, for example, encourage schools to post lesson plans and homework assignments to a child’s Facebook account? If children collaborate online about their homework assignment, so much the better. Most of what we do at work is collaborative. Why not encourage social education and make ebook widgets to enable this?
    I recently got a chance to watch some college students studying for their finals. They came up with a new way of studying together by connecting over Skype and chat and sharing screenshots of the ebooks they were reading. What makes this interesting is that these weren’t students studying together in the same dorm room or library but around the globe—in Dubai, Singapore, London, and Seattle. They cobbled together this setup themselves, without any help or guidance from professors.
    It’s important to worry about the future of education in a digital ebook-enabled world, especially if you have children, but I don’t think the future’s bleak. Instead, I think it’s full of possibility. When I put on my futurist’s hat, I see social connections everywhere inside ebooks. But even with all these social features, I think you’ll be able to curl up with a familiar book and turn off all the naysayers and chitchatters in the margins of your book. You will always be able to turn off the popular highlights. You will always be able to unplug from the network and enjoy a book like you always did before, in a golden hour of sunshine with a great read.

Bookmark: Book Covers
    There’s a mysterious man on the subway. He’s reading a book that you’ve read. There’s something roguish or attractive about him that you