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

librarians or digital libraries. Perhaps it’s because some of the best years of my life were spent in libraries, surrounded by books. I really do love print books. I spent a lot of my childhood at the county library every Saturday, and I learned more from the MIT library than I ever did from my professors. I was so open in my reading attitudes that I would devour everything. Fiction, math books, history—it was all tasty. To this day, I still spend hours walking through the racks of libraries, poking through their basement stacks, and looking for interesting or esoteric tomes. Libraries offer a sense of discovery like no other.
    Still, I was thrilled when my local library finally figured out how to offer ebooks to patrons. That night, I maxed out my library card and downloaded twenty books. The selection might still be small—only a few tens of thousands of ebooks—but I found abundant reading material. I ordered a pizza, stayed in, and read all night long—sheer bliss! And I love the convenience of being able to beam the books directly to my Kindle, instead of lugging them back from my local branch in the back of my pickup truck.
    For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you. Some books whisper, some shout, and some seem to speak for no reason whatsoever. But I’m sensitive to the way they all sound, all these voices that stay mute until you open the covers and start reading.
    I’m glad to see libraries embracing the promise of digital books, even though such books mean a threat of sorts to their continued existence—at least, the existence that libraries currently imagine for themselves. Because the charter of libraries is changing. Digital content is causing libraries to change now, just as newspapers changed ten years ago. For newspapers to thrive now, they have to target their local audiences. The ads need to be local, and so do the stories. Local papers can’t maintain staff reporters to investigate events abroad anymore, and they don’t need to. They focus on what’s local.
    Libraries can do the same. They can succeed by digitizing and making available local periodicals, historical archives, and books by regional authors. That’s how they can differentiate themselves and stay afloat. In contrast, there’s usually nothing local about a best-selling paperback. These more popular trade books are great candidates for being offered through a centralized, nationwide library service that local libraries can pay into.
    As it stands now, individual libraries can sign up with a company called Overdrive to offer lendable ebooks—but many choose not to, for budget reasons. Having to provide print and digital books to patrons is a financial burden. I think the sooner we can accelerate the adoption of digital books, the better it will be for libraries and the more likely that some of the smaller libraries—often with great regional and local treasures—will survive into the decades ahead.
    That said, I think there’s one little-considered adjunct to libraries that will likely fade with the widespread adoption of ebooks, and that’s the humble bookmobile.
    On Main Street America, the bookmobile is as much a fixture as the ice cream truck, trundling down shady streets on summer afternoons, bringing library books to kids all over the country. In a digital age, it’s hard to imagine a future for the bookmobile, except perhaps as an avant-garde piece of installation art from the past. It’s not likely that the truck will drive down the streets letting the kids borrow digital books and download them onto their iPad minis, effectively zapping the children with ebooks.
    In spite of the bookmobile’s demise, libraries as a whole have a great future. I elaborate in the next “bookmark” about bookworms and how libraries are likely to become instrumental as cultural safeguards of books, as a check against rampant retailer sales practices and possible censorship. There’s no better time than now to dust off your library card and check out some great ebooks to read on your iPad or Nook. You do have a library card, don’t you? I’ve been using mine so much recently that I’ve memorized the twenty-digit bar code.
    And I’ve fallen so much in love with my local library that I might just hug the librarian the next time I stop by.
    For now, books can be preserved forever in digital form, like pressed violets between pages of an ebook in the cloud. As