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

digital reading is digital creation. I’ve written a lot here about how ebooks are changing the way we read, but how is digital technology changing how we write?
    We’re getting more used to the idea of ebooks, but many artists still prefer to sketch on paper instead of the digital medium, and many writers still prefer to carry journals with them in which to record their ideas and impressions.
    Digital journals still haven’t become mainsteam. However, some companies are providing an interesting bridge between print and digital for writing. For example, Moleskine and Evernote have recently partnered to create a hybrid system that lets you write or draw on a special kind of paper inside Moleskine notebooks. The paper lends itself to automatic digitization and cloud upload through Evernote, a company that aims to let you archive and revisit all your memos and ideas online. I think this is great because it can make content more searchable and reusable. Content from a journal can be copied and pasted into a term paper or business plan rather than having to be retyped. Innovations like this make us more efficient.
    I’d like to say that I’m an early adopter and I’m deliberately choosing to write 100 percent digitally from now on, on principle. But the reality is otherwise—I had to learn from my own misfortune to go fully digital.
    Sometime over the weekend in summer, on a rare vacation, I lost my own journal. It might have been at a bakery or a farmers’ market. It might have been at a bar or a gallery, but I lost it. I no longer have my journal.
    It was a blue journal, the size of a regular notebook, with drawings and writing inside. It’s worthless to anyone but me. It has everything I wrote over the last two years. There are no passwords or bank account numbers in my journal. But there are illustrations I made and ideas I had about digital media.
    What is the lesson of losing my journal?
    I need to go fully digital.
    I learned that you can’t back up your journal to Dropbox or any other cloud backup service. And who knew? There’s no kiosk in a mall where you can back up or scan in regular, everyday objects so you can restore them if you lose them. There would be such a service in the ideal world, in the best of all possible worlds, but there isn’t here. Dropbox is great, but it won’t work for real-world artifacts, for things. Only bits.
    Because of the experience of losing my journal, I decided to go fully digital in my writing from now on. The experience of losing my journal has turned me into that guy in the corner of Starbucks who wears headphones and talks to his iPad, dictating his thoughts in a public place and making a fool of himself. It has exiled me to the shady corners of coffee shops and bus stations, away from the happy patrons who I might otherwise annoy with my dictational monologue. Losing my journal has made me mutter to myself like an old, drunken crazy man.
    There’s a benefit to this, of course. I can now back up whatever I write. If I have a kid one day, I’ll give her all my blank journals and let her draw in them. Or maybe I’ll give my kid a secondhand iPad, so her scrawls last a thouand digital years. The digital mode of creation immortalizes us; the analog mode humbles us.
    I’m not the first writer in history to lose a journal. Some writers have lost more. Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano , retired to the coast of British Columbia to write his second novel. He spent seven years writing in a cabin he built out of driftwood, but when he was about to mail his manuscript to his publisher, his house burned down and he lost everything. He had to spend another seven years rewriting and reconstructing the book, which was finally published as Ultramarine but which even the author himself admitted was a bit of a flop. Something about the loss affected his writing, and the book was never as good as the original. Reconstructions rarely are.
    There’s something about the surety of the Save button. When I save a document—like this one, as I type it on my computer—I know it’s instantly copied to the cloud. I’m safe, my writings are backed up, and I rest easy. Until, at least, the cloud topples over one day, and what was once in the much-vaunted cloud is reduced to digital dust. I imagine a collosal implosion, like that in the season finale of Lost where Locke destroys the Dharma Initiative’s Swan station. In the buildup to the countdown on Lost , you see computers