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

toppling over, steel walls imploding, all the girders creaking and straining, the countdown clock itself imploding, knives flying, metal struts rending and shrieking, and you hear the high-pitched whine of metal, the catastrophonic sounds of electromagnets bending the walls, and a woman’s voice announcing systems failure, before Locke admits, “I was wrong.” Easily the best three minutes in TV history.
    But the digital cloud won’t topple for a while.
    Maybe it will in fifty years or so, once we can no longer afford to power the many clouds. Facebook has its cloud, and so do Amazon, Apple, and Twitter. Basically, it’s new gold-rush country, but instead of gold, people are mining clouds. Old stalwart companies like Adobe and even Walmart need to have their own clouds. There are even companies selling devices to small businesses so they can manage their own clouds.
    It’s faddish, and it may all fail one day.
    Maybe then people will return to a simpler mode of life. Return to writing with pen and ink and, yes, the peril of permanently losing what you’ve written.
    Both print and digital are ephemeral. Our works can be destroyed in an instant with either. But at least digital versions give you backups.
    All these backups do introduce one casualty, however. With digital writing, there will be fewer manuscripts for sale. There used to be a healthy after-market among collectors to buy not only the first editions of a given novel, but also the author’s own manuscript. With digital manuscripts, this kind of collecting is pointless. Since value is typically related to scarcity, there’s no value to a unique good if it can be duplicated an infinite number of times.
    Though I’m bullish on digital writing, I do want to note that in the process of writing this chapter, my word-processing software crashed. Twice. I almost lost everything I wrote. Even after recovering what I could, a lot had to be rewritten from memory. So take this paean to the benefits of digital writing with a grain of digital salt!
    That caveat aside, now that so much is digitally composed, authorship is flourishing.
    Writing digitally instead of on old-fashioned typewriters lends itself to faster publication. Ebooks can be self-published in just hours. Retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon and Smashwords, who have their own self-publishing portals, have created ways of disconnecting authors from publishers. Authors who are savvy enough to use the newer self-publishing tools are flourishing.
    It’s been said of the American Revolution, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that it was a revolution of the people, for the people, and by the people. But let me tell you something about the ebook revolution: this is a revolution of the publishers, for the readers, by the retailers.
    Strangely enough, the roles of authors are mostly unchanged in this revolution. They’re still going to write on their computers or typewriters. Yes, some manuscripts are still typed out on old typewriters, although composing books digitally lends them a felicitous fluidity that enables them to be published faster. They’re more immediate now than ever before.
    In fact, digital authorship is alive and well! So many wonderfully obscure and unknown books are published on Kindle’s self-publishing platform, ranging from “lost books” of the Odyssey to bizarre theories of the universe. The rise of self-publishing and ebooks is giving little-known authors a megaphone. And sometimes the authors are heard. A few of them start out as self-published and then resell their books to big publishers, where they actually can be more successful.
    Such authors may have gotten their start with self-publishing, but they become truly successful only when courted afterward by a traditional publisher, who helps the author craft the raw content into a polished product that readers really want. Traditional publishers also provide such initially self-published authors with a bigger and better marketing platform, a broader reach, and frankly, legitimacy.
    I joke sometimes that self-publishing is mainly about cat poetry, but the universe of self-published content is truly vast. If only it were possible to surf through all these words easily, if only I could have a buffet of this content all at once—and truly, I do love to read, because to me reading is like being a starving omnivore at an all-you-can-eat buffet!
    There’s no better time than now to be a reader.
    And it’s a truly