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

sigh. We can still archaeologically excavate former libraries and palaces in the Middle East and turn up tablets and parchment, but no one will be able to take a shovel to Apple’s data center in North Carolina thousands of years in the future and unearth all of these servers, power them up again, and recover all the ebooks they once held.
    Indeed, book technology has reversed itself. Clay tablets, once durable but inconvenient, have been replaced by hard drives, which are highly convenient but very fragile. And though our words are now more widespread than ever, they barely have the lifespan of a hamster or a gerbil. They’re short-lived unless they’re constantly restored and backed up to new hard drives, to new computers. Ours is a culture that dances on the edge of ephemerality.
    If our servers slept for too long or if we left our iPads unplugged for too long, we’d wake up like Rip Van Winkle to find all of our book culture erased. And in the ultimate progression, if you look at this curve of decaying durability and increasing convenience over time, the inevitable trajectory is for our words to last as long as the twenty-four-hour life of the mayfly, to be as ephemeral as a June bug’s jitter. Someday, our ephemeral but instant thoughts themselves will be beamed in a quickenth of a second from brain to brain in some ultimate evolution of print technology. But will they last beyond that fraction of an instant?
    I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words. And digitization raises questions: since we’ve traded durability for culture, what happens if there are massive failures in our culture’s data centers? What happens if ebooks are one day wiped out? Viruses can now target nuclear power plants, so is it not conceivable that viruses could be developed to destroy ebooks?

Bookmark: Reading in Bed
    All of our brains are alike in some fundamental ways. We can all get into a book, whether it’s in print or digital format. We can all zone out and ignore the fact that the book is on an eInk screen or is bound into pages with glue that smells like fish vomit. We can ignore these things if it’s a really entrancing book.
    One of the times I enjoy reading the most is at night. I love reading in that golden hour before bed, where you’re able to put away your computer, your cell phone, anything distracting that keeps your mind unduly alert. And instead, you allow yourself to relax into a damn fine book. It doesn’t need to be a printed book; an ebook works just as well. Because as far as the brain’s concerned, the experience of reading an ebook can be the same as reading in print, in that you’re no longer aware of the medium itself—most of the time, anyway.
    At night, though, when you’re trying to sleep, using LCD screens or backlit e-readers can actually zap the production of melatonin in your body, keeping you awake longer and degrading the quality of the sleep you do eventually get. Thus, I rarely read a tablet before bed, preferring an eInk reader instead.
    If you’re using a glare-free e-reader that doesn’t zap you with light, reading in bed is even more of a pleasure than before. E-readers are lighter than most books, and you can annotate them without having to fumble in the dark for a pen. You’re absorbed into the book, and you can fall asleep with the ebook in your hands.
    In fact, this is my test of how well a new e-reader is built. If I can fall asleep with it while I’m reading at night—feeling my eyelids growing heavy and closing with that gluey cotton-candy sensation of sleep overcoming me, feeling the e-reader slip out of my hands and onto my bed—then it worked. The ebook was able to transport me into that stuporous yet sublimely sensible state of pre-sleep, the state in which I have my best ideas, when I’m able to let go of the rational and uninhibit the intuitive. I don’t care whether you’re reading in bed or on an airplane or on a train; you can still fall asleep with a really good digital book, if you allow yourself the leisure to do so.
    But that’s just me; I like reading in bed. Some people love to read with cigarettes and endless cups of coffee in a Manhattan diner. Some people love to read on their computers, endlessly following one link to the next, one website to another. Some people like to read at work between bites of their sandwiches or salads, their office doors closed during their lunch breaks, indulging in some downtime,