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

all, the book has already been written and already digitized. It just needs to be reconverted to ebook format.
    Because there’s such a frenzy happening now, however, many people are converting the same books over and over again and offering multiple versions of the same book for sale. Sometimes scores of different versions of the same text exist. But each version is corrupted in different ways. Because people are processing these books in bulk, they are rarely edited, and conversion errors rarely get caught. As a result, the books often get adulterated, and sections are chopped up or lost.
    In extreme cases, the book is no longer readable. More frequently, explosions of bizarre symbols from the outer reaches of your keyboard appear in the text for no reason whatsoever, like someone swearing at you in a foreign language. There’s a great Japanese word for this: mojibake . This phenomenon is often seen on international web pages when they’re rendered badly in browsers, but it’s happening a lot in ebooks too. While this problem is usually more noticeable in public domain content, you’ll sometimes see it even in books from top-tier publishers, such as when an ebook is rushed to publication with insufficient time to review the quality.
    You can’t blame the top publishers for moving fast. In a way, everyone involved with publishing is a bit of a hustler these days. There’s a wealth of opportunity to digitize the world’s content, an opportunity that will only come once to our culture as a whole.
    Some of these hustlers and opportunists are very crafty. I know a Russian guy who took a flatbed scanner into the Kremlin archives and scanned away relentlessly at all the books in the archives, with the intent of selling them digitally. After doing this for three years, he had enough books to sell as cheap print reproductions of the originals, but he couldn’t convert them into digital books. That’s because his scanners only did black and white, with none of the shades of gray in between, and the quality was just too poor to convert the scans into digital books.
    There’s a whole spectrum of opportunity for would-be mojibake hustlers these days. So go out and get yourself a flatbed scanner, fly to Iceland or Norway for a couple of years, and see what you can digitize! The gold rush is on to digitize content, and while you’re prospecting for gold, you might find entirely new minerals that no one is even aware of and for which there soon will be a market.
    I’m thinking in particular about sheet music scores, old pamphlets, or postcards. There’s a wealth of material to scan in and digitize, and books are just one part of this. Newspapers and magazines are part of this gold rush, although frankly—and I’m completely unbiased here—books are sexier than anything else.
    In addition to books, countless pamphlets, comics, newspapers, ’zines, and ephemera of every age could be digitized and made available. Books are only the surface of what’s possible. The printed word goes much deeper than the surface, and there’s a vast shadowy biosphere of words that’s currently unexplored and undigitized.
    But what do you think? What would you really like to see digitized? What ephemera from our print past—from cereal boxes to greeting cards—do you think needs to be preserved for perpetuity?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/20.html

Digitizing Culture
    There are a lot of different versions of how the future could play out in ebooks, but what I see happening first is what I’ll call the “utility” model, which is kind of like having ebooks available under a monthly Netflix-like subscription. We view electricity and water and TV as utilities, and most of us have to subscribe to them. Some are flat-fee, and some are priced based on how much they’re used.
    Right now, when you buy an ebook, you’re making a one-time transaction. But in the utility model, you would pay one monthly or yearly lump sum to get unlimited downloads. Perhaps the books wouldn’t actually be yours; think of them as rentals, available whenever you want to read. The download happens as fast as always, and the ebook is on your e-reader for you to read. Perhaps it expires in a week or two, but you can always download it again. It’s like a faucet. Water comes out of the faucet when you turn it on, and thus ebooks will, as well.
    Amazon recently launched such a Netflix for ebooks, but only a very few books from the Amazon catalog are part of