Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading
ebook content while letting the others provide the readers. Even Google ended up launching its own smartphone and tablet. Although there are challenges and pains that you go through as an organization to build out a device and the profit margin may not be high, by owning the reading experience at the hardware level, you can do things with content that no one else can.
Recent events have already shown that a retailer will take a loss on hardware if the content can make up for it in sales. For example, when Amazon released the Kindle Fire, an inexpensive tablet that could compete with Apple’s iPad, many manufacturing pundits believed that Amazon was losing money on every Kindle Fire it sold as a piece of hardware but was making up the balance on content sales. It was a brilliant business decision later mirrored by inexpensive e-reader tablets from Amazon’s competitors.
The same will hold true for future e-readers. If anything, prices will drop to levels so scary that corporate accountants and decision-makers at major retailers will need to have nerves of steel.
Bookmark: Lost Libraries
In doing research for this book, I wanted to watch old TV episodes of Oprah to find the day when Oprah discussed the Kindle with Jeff Bezos. It was a pivotal day for Kindle. Based on her show, the original Kindle sold out forever. In its way, the interview between Jeff and Oprah was a unique moment in history—for books, anyway. Between the two of them, Jeff and Oprah had done more than anyone else to promote and sell books in this century. You’d have to go back a hundred years to find another person who singlehandedly had as much impact on reading, and that was Andrew Carnegie, who opened 2,500 free libraries around the country at a time when American libraries were closed to the public.
But just a mere two years after the Oprah show aired, it’s no longer available anywhere on the internet or even the undernet. The show had a daily viewership in the millions, but it isn’t available anymore, with the exception of occasional bootleg clips here and there, like bits of papyrus buried in the Egyptian desert of the internet.
Media has a surprisingly short shelf life. For example, only four of the films of Theda Bara survive. The others are all gone, lost. Theda Bara was the original Hollywood vamp, one of the most massively popular actresses in all of movie history. In 1917, her film Cleopatra had the biggest budget of any film up to that point, $500,000, and that was at the end of World War I! And yet, all that remains of the film and Theda’s risqué outfits is a smudgy, five-second clip that was rescued from the vaults of the film studio as it was burning down decades later.
Theda Bara isn’t unique in this sense. Only ninety seconds of footage exists from one of the first animated movies, The Centaurs , made ten years before Disney came onto the scene. One of the first Westerns, Devil Dog Dawson , only survives as a thirty-eight-second fragment, found by accident in a mislabeled film can in Ohio. The first Technicolor film, On with the Show , a crowning success that raked in the modern equivalent of $2 billion in revenues, is now completely lost, although somehow, absurdly, a twenty-second color clip was found in a toy projector in the 1970s.
History was harsh with Theda Bara and a lot of other silent film stars, but it’s just as harsh with books. If you look back to the ancient world, there were three major libraries. First and foremost was the library of Alexandria in Egypt with about half a million volumes, then the library of Pergamum in Greece with 200,000 books, and then finally the library of Harran in Turkey. These three libraries held most of the books of the ancient world, and scholars still gnash their teeth and tear out their hair thinking about all the conquerors in the intervening centuries who dumped these books into rivers or burned them for fuel.
The story of books in the ancient world is a sad one. Anthony dismantled the library of Pergamum as a wedding present to Cleopatra. He emptied the shelves and sent all the books to Alexandria. But that library didn’t last long, because it was repeatedly decimated by fires and finally Islamic conquest. The only sizeable collection of books from the ancient world survived in Harran, a dusty outpost in Turkey where all the scholars fled from Egypt and Greece with their books. The books stayed hidden there until Arab scholars rediscovered and retranslated
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