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

what you read. Retailers like Amazon or Apple can see every page turn and know every word you’ve highlighted, every annotation you’ve made. As you’re reading on your beach chair, a giant looms behind you with a clipboard, peering over your shoulder.
    Every so often as we read, our cloud-connected e-readers report back home to notify the retailer about where we are in the book. This is often done so that if you have multiple devices, you can sync all devices to the same page. But this also lets retailers like Amazon and Apple know how far you’ve read through a given ebook. They’re able to monitor the progress you make. The information on reading patterns for a given ebook can be collected across multiple people, and the retailers can learn which ebooks were more successful. Do people abandon a given book halfway through? Is one particular chapter often skipped?
    This information isn’t yet being used to target your personal reading habits, but the reading patterns across multiple people for a given book could be used by the retailers—and sold back to publishers—to improve the quality of a given ebook. Perhaps the chapter that was often skipped needed to be better edited or needed an illustration to help explain what was going on. Or if the book is often abandoned partway through, then perhaps the publisher takes this information into account when it’s time to renegotiate the author contract.
    We’re not yet at the point where ads will be targeted to you based on the paragraph or sentence you’re currently reading, although Google does target ads to you if you’ve mentioned specific books, and Facebook’s platform allows advertisers to do the same. Still, I think many readers are comfortable with this intrusion into their privacy, especially if it means better ebook prices. So I can imagine free ebooks that are 100 percent ad subsidized. You get these ebooks for free, but the catch is that on the bottom of every page, you see a contextual ad, perhaps based on the content on that page or perhaps based on your own web-surfing habits on the internet.
    It’s easy for retailers to serve ads to you across multiple websites. Ads are sticky, like cockroaches dipped in honey, and you can’t quite get rid of them. It may not be long before you start to see those same sticky ads following you around on your ebooks. But until then, I think that your reading privacy will only be bent to provide statistics back to publishers, in the way I just outlined. If this ultimately serves to make for better-designed ebooks, and we as readers are oblivious to the way this data is being used, then perhaps there’s no harm to us in the process. For now.
    I mention the pico-projector e-reader as an example of the kind of disruptive hardware technology we may see in the years ahead. The future of ebooks is just getting started, after all. Lots of new technology will be coming to e-readers. Some types use organic crystals woven into intricate patterns or arranged in spirals. Some work like the wings on a butterfly, reflecting light at the right frequencies to reproduce full color. E-reader technology is an area of ongoing innovation, and the devices that will be out in just a couple of years will make existing eInk displays look like Edison’s wax cylinders.
    Eventually, e-readers may get so cheap that they’re unprofitable for retailers to sell. That makes you wonder whether they’ll continue to be sold. But consider the history of razor blades.
    In 1895, an inventor named King Gillette turned away from his architectural drawings of futuristic cities and utopias and hit on an idea for a new kind of razor. It took him ten years before he could manufacture them, but they were revolutionary. Instead of having to buy a razor blade and sharpen it before every use, you could buy reusable razor handles and disposable steel razor blades from Gillette. When the blades got dull, you just bought new ones. Gillette took a loss on every razor handle he sold. But what good is a handle without a blade? None at all, so he made a tidy profit on every blade he sold.
    Using this as a metaphor, you might ask whether a given retailer is in business to sell razors or blades. I say the answer is both. In truth, ebooks and e-readers are part of the flywheel for any ebook retailer. You can’t sell content without a reader, and you can’t sell readers without content, so you need both.
    No company can rest on its laurels yet and just focus on