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

five years as digital books go more mainstream. We may have a glut of books, in fact. If you’re like me and you think that the moldering, forlorn used books for sale on a scrappy rack outside a bookstore are sad, then wait until you see how much sadder it will get for printed books.
    Books that can fetch ten to twenty dollars today in used condition will be lucky to sell for ten to twenty cents in a few years, simply because the market for print books will be flooded and no one will need them anymore. A few book collectors will snap up the choicest pickings offered for sale, but the great majority won’t get sold, even at a penny each, because the buyers simply won’t exist in great enough numbers. It will be a buyer’s market. Unsold books will get donated to libraries, but even libraries don’t have infinite amounts of space.
    With this glut of used books will come a perceived cheapening of books. Our culture still perceives print books as precious, even in the age of mass production. Books are still seen as status symbols, after all. The wealthy often have finely apportioned libraries in their mansions (even if they’re often just decorative).
    But what will our culture be like when people start dumping their books because they simply can’t sell them? You’ll first see piles of unsold books outside the hipster neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco; then you’ll see piles of books by the trash on Sunday night for anyone to take. Then you’ll see community events in other cities where people get together on weekends and swap books.
    If there are 119 million readers in the United States, and every reader has an average of one hundred books, and half of these will be eliminated over the next ten years as people go digital, about six billion books will need to be disposed of in some way or another. That’s around four billion tons, or the equivalent of ten years of trash. It all has to end up somewhere.
    I think you’ll see a strange hybrid between dump and library—perhaps a section of the dump for books that’s cordoned off from the trash, a section run by profiteers or book-loving volunteers who will sell books by the pound or perhaps the truckload. What will the books be used for? Perhaps firewood or fuel.
    As books move to digital and fewer are printed, fewer print books will be sold, which will hasten the decline of bookstores. Physical brick-and-mortar bookstores are already struggling to compete with online giants like Amazon or Walmart when it comes to price and selection, and the move to digital just hastens the already sad decline.
    Most retail bookstores haven’t made the transition to the new digital culture. Even in university towns, the kinds of places where people usually read more, bookstores are closing their doors. Conventional bookstores that have focused on offering new books will fold, hit with the double whammy of fewer books being printed and the glut of used books on the market.
    Publishers often complain that digital books are forcing their hardcovers to die, and I think they’re right. The hardcover book is a print artifact, a technique publishers discovered that would let them milk the same stone for blood not just once, but twice. They could sell a new book at a more expensive price point to early adopters and then release a cheaper version to the mainstream months later.
    Digital books don’t allow this. They help democratize content. On the plus side, this means readers can—and often expect to—pay low prices for premium content, without hemorrhaging money into a hardcover edition. But on the minus side, a revenue source for publishers is falling by the wayside, which means it’s harder for them to take gambles on new content.
    A publisher often has a portfolio of books, much like your own investment portfolio. Some titles are low-risk but low-sales, like bonds, while others are likely to be high-risk and high-return, like stocks. The ebook revolution may be making publishers think twice before taking on the risk of promoting a new author. But then again, perhaps this financial pressure will force publishers to take different risks in the digital space, to innovate new product experiences.
    And this is healthy, even though some publishers will have to tighten their belts and others may fold by taking ill-timed risks that are too bold. It’s healthy because the culture of reading itself is changing.
    You used to be able to go to any college town, hang out in