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

enough. They’ll be a lot like eBay shipping centers where you go to get your goods packaged and mailed, a service that you’re happy to pay a small surcharge for, to save yourself the hassle.
    It will be a lot like going to the mechanic to get the tires on your car changed, except that now you will have newer, better tires. And yes, you’ll still have to pay a handling fee to dispose of the old tires or, in this case, your print books. The conversion machines will likely use what’s called destructive scanning, meaning that the book has to be destroyed to be converted. This is what most major publishers do when they have a print book that they want to convert into digital format.
    When I’ve traveled to destructive scanning facilities, I’ve seen machines that seem like they belong in a slaughterhouse, machines with whirling knives that slice the spine straight off the back of the book. Sometimes the process is more manual and less sophisticated. It may be a team of women in India sitting at a long table, holding razor blades, and doing the same work, but much more cheaply.
    I think you’ll see such a process at the mall, where nimble-fingered teens wield razor blades to scrape the spines from your book so that they can quickly scan each individual page. The book will be destroyed in the process, but the process will be painless for you—unless you had any emotional attachment to the book. It will be like a visit to LensCrafters, where you get your new glasses in about an hour.
    You can easily imagine the shady file-sharing markets that might emerge as people learn that they can swap these scanned-in files with one another. Or maybe people will go to bookstores with these toaster-sized devices under their trench coats and scan in this week’s bestsellers. But in a positive sense, I think this type of conversion will help the used ebook market grow, making that eventuality turn into an inevitability. Maybe with this kind of device, legitimate used ebook stores will emerge. Maybe used ebooks can be resold once or twice before they spontaneously combust like Maxwell Smart’s secret messages.
    Books are important, so let the consumers have them, used or otherwise. Publishers should get a fair price, as should authors and any middlemen like retailers, without whom the entire ecosystem would fail. Likewise, I think libraries can benefit. There might even be a company whose sole purpose would be to allow libraries to exchange digital copies of one another’s scanned books so that they don’t have to rescan each book at each library.
    The value of books will change, of course, and perhaps for the better. Right now, books that are esoteric and hard to find are at a premium because there are few print copies of them. But once a book is digitized, with endless amounts of secure backups, there’s no reason why prices shouldn’t drop. And prices should follow a new paradigm: the price of a book should be inversely proportional to its popularity.
    We see this now with out-of-print books from before 1923. When digitized, they’re commonly free. They’re part of the public domain. There are older books that are not part of the public domain, not yet, and when they’re digitized, they’ll be of interest to historians and scholars and anyone who happens to follow links to them in a possible Facebook for Books. The cost of these older books should be damn cheap, almost zero.
    Conversely, the most popular books of the day—like those on The New York Times bestseller list—should be at a premium, in keeping with the marketing investment that the publishers spent to promote them and create consumer demand. But a book that was on The New York Times list five years ago is rarely worth the same as what’s on the list this week. We see the decay in price of new titles, but older, rarer books are still inflated in price because they haven’t been digitized.
    There’s a chilling reversal, though, by which retailers might become the new libraries.
    This is a scary mind shift, but it is in keeping with the currents of our culture as we commoditize every aspect of our lives. Given these currents, it makes sense that retailers will assume stewardship of our culture. Libraries once held all of the world’s knowledge, but, with rare exceptions, there is no longer any library on the planet with a larger collection than the books currently held by the likes of Amazon or Google or Barnes & Noble. Information is available, but