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

them, leading in part to the Renaissance of knowledge around Gutenberg’s time.
    The fate of these ancient libraries is instructive and offers models of what might happen with corporate mergers and ebooks. Is it too hard to imagine a future where Google and Apple merge and combine their vast ebook libraries—only to suffer the slings and arrows of corporate fortune and go bankrupt one day, the books disappearing as the servers get shut down and rust, as distant data centers become overgrown with ivy and vines? Perhaps Amazon survives for a while before it, in turn, is acquired by some future new-media company, its ebooks relegated to an archive, perhaps to survive, perhaps not.
    What would it be like to live in a future where all media is consolidated under one company? Not only would that company be able to set arbitrarily high prices on content, but it could also bury any content in its vaults, effectively censoring it. And what would it be like if that company failed, went bankrupt, or worse, lost its media archives? What if all the content was destroyed, perhaps through a massive server outage or an act of internal sabotage by a disgruntled employee or a digital ebook-eating virus?
    Such a loss is too catastrophic to consider. But it could happen. Technological obsolescence not only happens to hardware and software, but also to institutions. After all, there were only three major libraries in the ancient world—and only one of them survived long enough for its books to be retranslated and preserved. Likewise, there are only three major digital media retailers now—Apple, Amazon, and Google. Which of these three, if any, do you think will survive? Fast-forward a hundred years: what do you think it would be like if one company monopolized our media?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/19.html

The Future of Writing
    The print revolution in Gutenberg’s time was truly revolutionary because it allowed knowledge to be distributed to masses of people. It was no longer necessary to hoard parchment, and books weren’t only available for the elite. Printing has undergone changes since then, but most of them have been evolutionary rather than rev olutionary.
    For example, when mass-market paperbacks emerged in the mid-1930s, they weren’t revolutionary. Mass-market paperbacks were pioneered by the Penguin publishing house, which took the novel approach of producing books from cheap pulp, hence the term “pulp fiction.” In fact, the mass-market paperback books themselves could be recycled into pulp and reused as paper for the publisher’s next mass-market paperback. All the books you see in grocery-store checkout aisles and airports owe their existence to the mass-market paperback format. The idea was evolutionary because it allowed books to be sold for even cheaper prices and for incrementally more people to read them.
    Don’t get me wrong; we need evolutionary improvements.
    But revolutions are acts of genius. They take multiple evolutionary improvements and compress them into one new product. Gutenberg’s printing was revolutionary because it combined multiple evolutionary improvements (moveable type, the printing press, and oil-based inks). The iPhone was revolutionary in the same way (large touchscreen phone, apps, GPS, and unlimited data plans), and so were ebooks.
    As a culture, we can’t go back to the pre-iPhone days of the mere cell phone. And we can’t go back to the pre-ebook days of Borders, B. Dalton, and your local bookseller. In part, that’s because these stores are closed, bankrupted. The immediacy of digital ebook downloads and the convenience of a cloud-based library have replaced them. Moreover, ebooks are eternal.
    Classical scholars may hope one day to find a lost work of Aeschylus in the bindings of an Egyptian mummy or Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Won in an old English priory. But ebooks democratize and extend the longevity of books. Your aunt’s self-published volume of cat poetry will survive the eons, and your grandpa’s autobiography will help your descendant in the twenty-fourth century to build a family tree. Our words aren’t dependent on penurious scribes or budget-minded librarians or choosy auditors at the Library of Congress. Our words are liberated—that is, if we choose to write them in the first place.
    Paradoxically, even though ebooks have ushered in a revolution in reading, the digital culture of our internet age is making writing more difficult.
    The flip side of