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

book.
    Am I alone in my appreciation of book covers? Let me know what you think about them, for good or for bad. And let me know what your favorite book cover is or any ideas you have for salvaging book covers in the digital age!
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/17.html

Libraries
    Take a walk, if you will, through a university library, through one of the areas where nobody ever goes, like the section on 1870s foreign literature. Northwestern University outside of Chicago has a great library, and if you peruse its desolate dusty sections, you’ll chance upon tomes from the era when books were bound with intricate marbled covers, a book-binding tradition that sadly is in decline. If you’re lucky enough to find such a marbled book, you’ll perhaps marvel at all its whorls and frothy bubbles, at all the inky emulsions! And the smells, the deliciously antique smell of old books, so musty, so brittle, so familiar but so sad.
    A Kindle or iPad will never smell quite so lovely in its decline. If anything, it will smell of polyethylene and be frazzled like an overheated hair dryer. If it’s white, it will take on the vaguely urine-colored tint that all old plastic gets when it ages.
    But no e-reader will last as long as any book you’ll find in a library. Kobos and Nooks and other devices will be relegated to sock drawers and trash bins, or lost in the garage sales and swap meets of techno-commodity fetishism. Devices like the Kindle have a lot of sales appeal, but only for a limited lifespan.
    While the Kindle1 had such great demand in 2007 that it sold out in five hours and sold on eBay for 400 percent of the original price, it’s doubtful that you could sell a Kindle1 today. There’s always a later and greater device on the market. Companies who manufacture consumer products know this and design with this technical obsolescence in mind. As they’re manufacturing the device that will hit the shelves tomorrow, they’re already at work on its replacement.
    While the reading hardware may age, the ebook content—being digital—is eternal. And likewise, because it’s digital, it’s possible to have a near-infinite number of copies of a given digital book. Perversely, though, your local library is only likely to have a handful of copies of a given digital book. Why is this?
    Libraries have a fixed budget every year for what books they can purchase. So whether a given library wants to buy a print or a digital copy of a book, it’s still going to have to pay for that book. That means that if you’re late returning an ebook, you may still have to pay late fees (or, more humanely, the ebook will simply turn itself off and return to the library for another patron to use, even if you weren’t finished reading it). This is because only a fixed number of patrons at a time can borrow the ebook from a library.
    So even though digital inventory is infinite—even though all the patrons of the library could, in theory, download the same copy of the ebook at the same time, licensing terms will prohibit that from happening. Yes, you’ll still have to reserve a digital ebook, just as you do a print book. The real benefit is that you’ll be able to check out and download your library ebooks from anywhere. You’re not going to need to go to a library to do that.
    Libraries are always budget-constrained, and you’re going to start seeing less and less shelf space dedicated to print books, because they’re costly to maintain, rebind, stack, and insure. In an effort to save space and preserve shrinking resources, libraries will trend toward becoming miniature clouds of their own, collections of hard drives with all these ebooks on them. Perhaps the librarians themselves will become digital avatars of their former selves too, giving you online advice on which ebooks to read or which electronic encyclopedias and resources to use.
    What will it mean as we lose this personal touch? Will we want to seek advice from an algorithm? Will we appreciate it if librarians are outsourced to a call center in the Philippines and there’s no personal touch? No. I think we’ll come to regret this loss. Whenever I visit my favorite library at the University of New Mexico, I find the librarians eager to help and anxious to please. I like the personal touch, the care they provide, and I believe we should work to embrace and preserve their crucial role as gatekeepers and conveyors of information.
    I’m somewhat skeptical of the idea of digital