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

long as our ebooks can keep pace with changing file formats and are duplicated enough to avoid loss through hard-drive crashes, their future is assured.
    The ebook revolution allows us, once and for all, to know ourselves. As a culture, we no longer need to fear death. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence will live on in digital form, even if the aging originals in Washington, DC, turn too brittle to read. We no longer need to fear culture loss—assuming, of course, that there’s no futuristic form of library burning through selective viruses that attack a library’s data center and preferentially wipe out ebooks, like digital Huns or Vandals.

Bookmark: Bookworms
    Ebooks don’t get viruses—not yet, anyway. Your own computer might succumb to a virus that turns it into a spambot zombie sending Viagra emails all over the globe or that monitors your keystrokes and sends your credit card numbers overseas. But your ebooks are safe. Until a nanovirus is made that can burrow through plastic and glass and eat away at resistors and diodes, the bookworm is an insect of the past.
    I, for one, am glad I’ll never have to see bookworms again. In the summer of 2000, I packed up all my belongings and put them in a storage facility in Boston before taking an international job assignment for a couple of years. Little did I know that just a few months after I left Boston, the storage facility would be flooded and my belongings on the basement floor pretty much ruined.
    When I came back three years later in a moving van and saw the intricate colonies of fungus and rot on the walls, I was in despair. I opened up brittle cardboard boxes to find books whose pages were punctuated by insect tunnels and running lines of blue mold like antifreeze fluid. I lost hundreds of books, more than you’d find in an average public school library. It was devastating.
    Culturally, though, we still face deterioration and loss of our content, although it’s at the hands of something bigger than bookworm beetles. I’ll put it to you like this: In the old days of antiquity, the works of Cicero and Plato were copied by hand, and because the copying took so long, scribes had to be choosy about what they preserved. If they didn’t like a given book or didn’t have enough parchment, they wouldn’t copy it.
    Because of this, we’ve lost a tragic number of works from antiquity.
    • Aeschylus only survives in 10 percent of his seventy known works. The rest are now lost. Another playwright, Sophocles, only survives into the twenty-first century with 5 percent of his works.
    • Only half of Euclid’s math books survive. Perhaps one of the missing books was an early work of calculus? If it had been more widely circulated in its day, maybe we’d have had computers by the Middle Ages and Greek colonies on the moon by now.
    • Julius Caesar not only had time to defeat the French and become Rome’s first emperor, but he also wrote fifteen books, of which only a third now survive.
    • The Old Testament used to be much larger, with 46 percent of it now missing. As many as twenty-one lost books are referenced in the Bible (such as the Acts of Solomon and the Book of the Wars of the Lord). There are probably more that we don’t even know about because the Bible never mentions them.
    • Shakespeare fared better, with 93 percent of his works surviving, but even living as he did in the age of the printing press, at least three of his plays are lost, perhaps for good.
    This same kind of blight can affect us with ebooks. If you take the long view of history and agree that wars and economic collapses and the redrawing of nations’ lines will continue to happen, and that technologies will continue to shift, then it’s inevitable that some of our ebooks will also one day become lost. But now, the magnitude for loss is much greater.
    If a company like Google or Apple goes under, they might take all their books with them. It takes a lot to power a cloud, to keep all these ebooks humming in their hives. So in a large-scale book blight, there’s as much chance that my aunt’s book about her favorite cat will be preserved for posterity as that a book by J.K. Rowling might be. In fact, I would argue that an author’s best strategy is to avoid making her works exclusive to any one retailer, that it’s best to put your eggs in multiple baskets.
    We can’t read the future, but the opportunity for a wholesale book blight through negligence or gradual