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

it, and you only get one free ebook a month. Would you use Netflix if it only showed nature documentaries, episodes of the 1980s cartoon He-Man , and Mexican wrestling matches? Unless you’re an aficionado of lucha libre , you’ll probably wait until more ebooks are part of the program.
    Of course, true book lovers may cling to their print books. For one, books smell nice—although it’s possible that e-reader manufacturers could add the “old book” smell to their products. It’s been shown that volatile chemicals like acetic acid, furfural, and lipid peroxides contribute to that musty smell, and they could easily be swirled into the e-reader’s plastic when it’s being manufactured.
    Another reason why book lovers aren’t giving up print books is because the books are not yet available electronically. When Kindle launched, about 90,000 ebooks were available for sale on its website. Even now, at the time of this book’s writing, there are only 1.8 million Kindle ebooks. This may sound like a lot, but it’s chump change compared to the 35 million books in print. Early adopters like CEOs and former presidents and astronauts would have no problem buying e-readers despite the limited content selection, but mainstream readers demand more content selection.
    To get even more books digitized, I think a company could make a device the size of a toaster oven into which you could put a book, a device that would work on books of most sizes. The device would page quickly through the book, take a picture of each page, and upload the pages to the cloud. The toasters would have to be intelligent enough to correct for poor lighting conditions and the way the words get elongated near the break between pages. If you don’t believe me, try placing a book on a photocopier and see what you get. See how the words get distorted and unreadable near the spine.
    I imagine it would be called the “ebook toaster.” As far as gadgets go, the ebook toaster would be kind of dangerous. A warning label on it would recommend that it be used by people age 18 and older. Why? The two blades inside the toaster would be sharp enough to slice off the spine of a book. And just as a regular toaster has a tray to catch the breadcrumbs from your bagels or pizzas, the ebook toaster would have a tray to catch the spine that’s been snipped. If books could bleed, this tray would catch the blood.
    Mechanical robot arms would unfurl themselves within the toaster and lift each page, one at a time. An arrangement of mirrors and cameras would carefully take pictures of each page. When that process is done, you would either put a rubber band around the remaining pages to keep the print book, or you’d dispose of it. As long as your ebook toaster is connected to your home’s Wi-Fi network, you would get your ebook back in about an hour. It would show up on your e-reader’s home screen, ready to read, with no crumbs or burnt crusts.
    When the ebook toaster finished its job, the ebook would be reassembled in a reflowable format from each of the original book’s pages. This would allow you to convert your library of print books to digital. Perhaps it would take a half hour per book, but once it was done, the process would be like ripping a CD into MP3 files. You’d have the ebook files accessible anytime, anywhere, regardless of device. In 2003, I spent a few months slowly inserting all my CDs into my computer to gradually digitize my music collection, and now I have those music files forever.
    Perhaps instead of doing this at home with an ebook toaster, you’d hire a company to do the conversion for you. Readers like you and me aren’t going to sign contracts with conversion houses in India or the Philippines to convert our personal libraries, book by book. But that’s okay. Companies will come into existence to do this for you, at a cost. I think that in a few years, you’ll be able to mail boxes of your print books to conversion facilities that will manage the print-to-digital conversion and send you back files in the format of your choice. Or maybe you’ll see larger versions of the ebook toasters at the mall.
    You may see kiosks in the mall where you can bring your books and get them converted. You can watch while they do it, or come back after you’ve gotten a pretzel from the food court, and then collect your digital books on your flash drive. You’ll see these kiosks in malls, and probably small stores too, where retail space is cheap