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

it’s no longer freely available.
    This is a future that I don’t entirely welcome for philosophical reasons, but it does seem likely. Retailers might become the new libraries. Perhaps this happens first by publishers acquiring one another so that they can lobby for favorable ebook terms and discounts with retailers. Indeed, we’re already seeing this, with the recent merger between Random House and Penguin. To be competitive, smaller publishers may feel pressure to acquire other publishers or merge with them so that, as a bloc, they can negotiate with the retailers.
    Eventually, though, what’s to stop a company like Amazon from acquiring one of these large publisher conglomerates? Apple might then have to retaliate and buy another mega-publisher. Retailers will try to acquire publishers’ vast content holdings in a bid to become the predominant purveyor of the written word—whether in book form, magazine form, or pamphlet form.
    And once this future is played out, then what happens? Do the retailers themselves converge and consolidate, like banks did in the 1990s? Are they acquired by the governments, in response to the monopolization of the written word or because of fears that retailers will hijack the language itself and censor it? Does Apple send emissaries out to all the state libraries of the world and license digital rights to their content?
    I can’t tell you. My crystal ball is dark regarding this matter. When I first joined Amazon, they gave me a Magic 8 Ball. They gave them to all new employees at the time. When I shake my Amazon-issued Magic 8 Ball, this time it says, “Ask Again Later.” For now anyway, the future is as cloudy and as dark as a busted eInk screen.
    Only one thing is certain: content was, and is, still king.
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    Clearly, as a culture, we’re smitten with the digital. Ebooks make sense for so many reasons. But what will happen to print books in the years ahead?
    As more and more people buy ebooks, they’ll start to preferentially buy ebooks, because the experience is so “sticky” and because the more digital books you have, the more you gain from the network effects of searching and indexing, something that works poorly in print books.
    Eventually, there will be a tipping point at which the benefits of digital outweigh print, and there will be a mass shift from print to digital. Nobody in the book industry is sure exactly where the tipping point is for selection. It may be that Amazon or Apple needs to have 95 percent digital coverage of all the books in print before people stampede to ebooks.
    But for a time, people will have libraries that are part digital, part print. Those of us who see what’s coming realize that as more consumers start buying ebooks, they’re going to look at their personal libraries of print books and try to figure out what to do with them, since they’re becoming obsolete.
    The obvious thing to do is to sell them.
    You’re going to see a lot more used book sales in the next ten years than ever before. People are going to start dumping their print books to get whatever prices they can from them, simply because it’s more convenient to go digital. And let me tell you, print books are not convenient. I have four thousand of them, which means that every time I move into a new house, I have to box them up and haul them around, something my back may not be able to handle one day! So I’ve started selling them.
    I’ve sold more than a thousand of my print books already on Amazon’s used book marketplace. It’s simple to do, especially if you have a computer with a video camera on it. The video camera can scan in the bar codes on the back of the books through the same process that retail stores use to scan products with a laser at checkout. Software like Delicious Library automates a lot of this, and you can often get a free membership to Amazon’s Seller Central that lets you sell your used books. You don’t have to work at Amazon like I did to get these benefits!
    There’s actually a thriving subculture of people armed with laptops who go to used bookstores, scan in the bar codes with their video cameras, and see if any of the books are worth enough to buy used from the bookstore. If so, they resell the book online at a higher price. You’ll see more of this in the years ahead, as well as better tools on smartphones to allow non-experts to make a living at this.
    I think we’re going to see a huge number of used book sales in the next