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

democratic time now for being an author, in that anyone who can use Microsoft Word or blog-authoring tools can quickly publish a book—but with democracy comes altogether too many options. In some ways, this is a case where the paradox of choice reigns supreme. Two or three hundred years ago, your choice of authors might’ve been limited to Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, but now there are too many authors, too many choices . Almost too many choices, in fact.
    There are so many choices now that we may be afraid to make a choice. This is known as the paradox of choice . It’s easier to choose between chocolate and vanilla than to choose between fifty-seven flavors at your local Baskin-Robbins. You’ll stare at all the flavors, numbed and likely to leave in despair, overwhelmed by all the choices.
    In addition to swamping readers with a surfeit of great books, the ebook revolution will place demands on authors. Especially authors who choose to use larger publishers.
    Publishers will eventually require their authors to log in to websites that show statistics about their books. For a given chapter that the author wrote, the sites will show statistics about what percent of people read that chapter, which pages were highlighted the most, which pages were shared most on social networks, and spelling mistakes or anachronisms that readers pointed out.
    The author will need to use this data in making revisions for a second or third edition of the book. Or perhaps this data will be available to the author as he or she plans a new book—to see what content engaged readers most and what sections were too difficult for the target audience to read. Editors may not even be part of the process. Authorship may be a direct relationship between readers and authors, mediated by these web pages of statistics culled from the thousands of readers and their reactions to the content.
    In the years ahead, authors will have to become amateur statisticians.
    Likewise, these stats will open up worlds of possibility for the writing process itself. It will mean that the process of writing an ebook is no longer static.
    When traditional brands launch a new ad campaign, they usually create multiple versions of the ad for what’s called “A/B” testing. Version A of the ad gets shown to one group of people online in a test market, and version B gets shown to another group. After a few days, the results are tallied, and whichever ad is more effective is picked to go national. The same process will happen with ebooks. An author will be able to publish version A of an ebook with a plotline that differs slightly from version B. Once results are in from readers, the author can pick the more effective ebook.
    The ebook you read may be different from the ebook your friend reads, even if it has the same title. Ebooks are no longer static, in the same way that your experience of a given website is different from my own because the ads are customized, different for each of us. For an author, writing an ebook will be like a visit to the optometrist and getting fitted for new glasses. Better A? Better B?
    The future of writing is changing and requires authors to be part engineer, part marketer, part statistician, and oh yes, part writer too.

Bookmark: Degraded Text
    Monks in medieval monasteries worked hard to preserve the writing in scrolls and parchments whenever they’d recopy them. The same thing is true of the Arabs who cared for most of the Greek texts that we now have from the era of Plato and Sophocles. They were very wary of making textual missteps and introducing errors, concerned as they were with the wisdom of the past and the purity of the written word.
    But now we’re in a more capitalistic time. There’s a frenzy of digitization going on with ebooks, and everyone’s rushing out of the woodwork to profit from books. As these profiteers rush to the market, the texts that they’re bringing us are getting degraded.
    For example, there’s a wholesale rush to take all the books in free web archives that have been around for decades—like Project Gutenberg—and repackage them for Kindle and iPad. People are doing these conversions because such books, while not as popular as bestsellers from The New York Times , still have fans who would pay a modest premium to buy such a book. Although these books are likely to garner fewer sales than a more contemporary, popular book, a lot less effort is needed to ready them for sale to consumers. After