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

that wouldn’t help either. Against the onslaught of digital media, reading may decline to nothing more than a faded art form, neglected like ballroom dancing or Appalachian fiddle music.
    In this sense, you might think that the future of reading is doomed. How can reading cope, given that movies and TV shows already provide a surfeit of details for us to work with? When you watch Star Wars, you don’t need to imagine what Darth Vader looks like under his mask; you can see each lurid scab on screen.
    Likewise, video games don’t make the same demands on you as reading. Animators have crafted a whole world for you, along with computer-generated faces and professionally recorded voices. This makes it easier for you to experience the movie or TV show or video game, as your mind isn’t being taxed. But this is itself a drawback. If the imaginative faculty is seen as a kind of muscle that you flex inside your mind, then not using it may cause it to weaken and atrophy.
    In some ways, this is a problem of philosophy. Does imagination matter?
    If pre-imagined media experiences are what matter to you, then ebooks alone cannot compete against the onslaught of TV, movies, and video games.
    Many ebooks are still mostly text, and the few experiments that attempt to hybridize movies and reading come off like tigers mated to killer whales. They’re like bestial monstrosities. Interesting as such experiments may be, the future of books does not lie in this direction.
    No, the future for books is a return to the imaginative faculty, to the resonance between reader and author that causes the reader’s heart to flutter and his pulse to quicken, which causes him to sympathetically sweat when a zombie crashes onto the page or when a loved character is brutally murdered with a knife through the eye. Movies and TV and video games may win out in terms of production costs and special effects when compared to a humble book, but no movie yet made can let you into its world. Readers inhabit a book. They burrow into Frodo’s hobbit hole and curl up with him for a pot of tea. In contrast, the only way to “read” a video game or movie is when you are not participating in it.
    As an example, I’m on an airplane now, heading back to Seattle. As I walk down the aisle to stretch my legs, I see plenty of Kindles. It sometimes seems like there are more Kindles on airplanes than Rollaboards. But even with all the Kindles and iPads, books seem to be outnumbered. On this airplane, at least, there are more laptops and video-game consoles, more people playing games and watching movies. The written word is outnumbered two to one.
    When I return to my seat, the kid next to me is playing his video game. He’s utterly absorbed by the blinking dots, hunched over his game like Quasimodo and reacting to the electrons on his screen. It’s reactive. It’s a matter of stimulus and response. And I know this feeling well; I’m no stranger to video games. I know that when you’re absorbed in a game, it’s all-consuming.
    But afterward, when the game is turned off, you can reflect, strategize your next steps, and plan ahead. It’s at such times that you really “read” a game. And likewise, the most voracious “readers” of a movie are the fans that obsess about it afterward, who imagine themselves as characters in the movie, or who buy books or director’s cut DVDs afterward to read into the nuances of the movie’s world.
    I think this redefinition of “reading” bodes well for the future of books. But it means a shift in thinking. It means that any media experience can be “read” like a book, that there’s no preferential treatment of books over other forms of media, as long as the content is “read” with an active imagination. Because philosophically, I do think the imaginative faculty is important. I couldn’t live without it.
    And I think that most of the successful people I know at Amazon, Apple, and Google, as well as among the publishers of the world, are those who are most creative, most imaginative. These are people who “read” into experiences, who don’t just talk to me about what was on TV last night but who imaginatively transplant themselves into the worlds of those TV shows. They’re the kind of people who wonder what it’s like to be a Cylon in Battlestar Galactica , who “read” into a media experience and apply it to their own lives, and who patch in details of the media with their own life experiences to