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

that saw saber-toothed tigers ranging through what’s now Los Angeles, or wooly mammoths roaming through Chicago, or giant ground sloths, ten feet tall, loping through what would become Las Vegas.
    That we had giant sloths in America surprises me. That all the passenger pigeons died out stuns me simply because of the reason for their extinction. They were killed for their meat, and generations of Americans knew no other meat than pigeon meat. Tiny pigeon sausages. Pigeon pies. In the span of about a hundred years, one of the most common American birds was gradually exterminated.
    Likewise, books once had a glorious range. Books roamed the world. They traveled in luggage on the Pan-Am flights of the 1950s, were carried in purses and satchels on trans-Atlantic schooners, were carried by the Pony Express across the continent, and were often an important part of dowries of noblewomen. But now the range of books has shrunk, like the range of passenger pigeons, although not yet as terminally.
    You can still find books on dusty ornamental bookshelves in some hotel lobbies. You can find them in the lost-and-found bins of large train stations and on sun-bleached shelves at beach resorts. You can still find thriving populations of books at college bookstores and libraries. Somewhat surprisingly, you can also find books in prison libraries, which boast higher circulation rates than almost any other kind of library.
    But like passenger pigeons, like coyotes, like black bears, and like ancient coelacanths—dinosaur fish from millions of years ago that only live off two islands in the Indian Ocean—books inhabit a restricted range when compared to how prolific they were in their former glory days.
    In ecological terms, books are threatened with extinction.
    Books aren’t capable of reproducing in the wild or in captivity, although more and more book titles are published every year. But fewer physical books are being sold with every passing year, even if there are more titles to choose from. Book sales overall are tipping toward digital now.
    Books are threatened with extinction, but like the smartest of animals in the wild, they’re adapting. They’re evolving instead into ebooks.
    It’s almost contradictory for me to be a futurist of books. It’s like being a futurist of telegraphs or a futurist of rotary phones, because the death knell for print books has, in my opinion, sounded. As printed artifacts, books share a sacred reliquary along with eight-track tapes, gramophones, and LaserDiscs. But print books haven’t died yet, and they’re not going to go gently into the night.
    In the upscale home décor stores of the future—and by future, I mean ten years from now—tucked in among the rugs and tapestries and oversized urns and stuffed animal heads, you’ll start to find books sold as decorative items. They might be artistically bound with strips of copper. They might have keyholes from doors installed onto their spines. They might be artfully aged and lacquered. Perhaps they’ll be set up on pedestals, or a small ceramic pigeon will be perched on the book. But you’ll start to see books altered, turned into art objects.
    In a trip today to my local art town, I saw three stores that sold these types of altered books. Some of the books were turned into pulp and molded into trees, with smaller books hanging from them as fruits would. I saw pages from a book carefully razor-bladed out with an X-Acto knife and painted to show scenes of children playing in a field.
    What does it say about us as a culture that we’re turning books into art?
    To me, it says we’re aware of the passing of books, and we’re mournful. We feel pent-up nostalgia for books. We’re aware of a genuine loss, one that we can only express with X-Acto knives and spray cans of lacquer and glitter. We’re altering books, making them into art and ennobling them with ideas that are too hard to put into words. We’re transforming humdrum leather-bound books that were formerly commodities into artistic statements.
    We’re aware somehow that art will last longer than commodities, and our artists are salvaging some books in a repurposed form, in the hope that some of them will last through the ages. Because let’s be honest: do you really think the major libraries are going to hold on to all of their print books in an age of cheap terabyte hard drives? Do you really think the Library of Congress is going to digitize its book collection and then keep