Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading

As retailers like Barnes & Noble and Apple entered the e-reader market, they created increased competition for Amazon. But more importantly, and more positively for Amazon, their success signaled that the ebook market was evolving from mere innovation to full-blown revolution.

And because the ebook revolution is largely technical, the best measure by which to view it is the theory of the diffusion of innovation.

Everett Rogers wrote a book called The Diffusion of Innovations, in which he describes the five phases that an innovation goes through as it makes its way through a population. These phases can be used to understand the way consumers approach any new innovation, such as cars or cell phones or computers. Each phase is represented by a group of adopters in the society.

Statistically speaking, the first 2.5 percent of the population to adopt a new technology are called innovators. The next 13.5 percent are early adopters, and the next 34 percent are the early majority. If you add up these three groups of people, you get 50 percent, half the population. The remaining two groups are the late majority, which represents the next 34 percent and, finally, the laggards, with the final 16 percent.

The labels for these five phases in the diffusion of innovation speak for themselves. But to roughly sum it up, the younger and wealthier you are, the more you tend to find yourself on the side of the innovators. The more risk-averse and traditional you are, the more you find yourself with the laggards. Your social status and education level often follow the same progression.

These factors correlate time and time again with every invention that’s been studied using the theory of diffusion of innovation. In fact, innovators and early adopters are no longer the only ones who speak about the diffusion of innovation. The theory has become part of the arsenal of tools used by marketers and product managers when they dream up new business ideas or gadgets. Whether you, as a consumer, are aware of this is unimportant to the people who make and market products, because the theory of diffusion of innovation is as real to them as the law of diminishing returns and the 80/20 principle.

Here are a few examples of how the diffusion of innovation works. It took eighty-three years from the time refrigerators were first available in the United States for them to be available to more than half the households, which finally happened in 1940. Flush toilets were invented later than refrigerators, but they took only forty-three years before they reached everyone in the early majority. That accelerating trend has continued with more recent innovations. Home electricity took only twenty-two years before it reached half of all U.S. households. It took nineteen years for radio, fifteen years for TV, and only ten years for the World Wide Web.

As we move further into the future, the diffusion of innovation happens faster. You don’t have to take my word for this; any study of the diffusion of innovation shows the same progression of this acceleration of culture throughout history. Perhaps this acceleration is caused by the explosion in innovations than can be reassembled to make still more new innovations. The acceleration can be bewildering if you’re unable to keep pace with it. To this day, my grandmother still refuses to use email, and whenever she has anything important to send, she uses a fax.

When are ebooks likely to reach the early majority? Taking a conservative approach and assuming that will take ten years (the same amount of time it took for the internet to reach the early majority), that puts us squarely in 2016, ten years after Sony launched its first e-reader in the United States. I personally think it’ll happen faster, because I’m not conservative, and I see the acceleration of adoption rates across innovations. But even if the conservative estimate is right, half the people who read will have an e-reader of some sort by 2016—and possibly a year or so earlier.

By the early majority phase, you’re at the sweet spot in the rate of adoption, when the most consistent growth is happening from year to year. My numbers tell me that’s where we are now—with the population of readers in the United States, at least. A 2012 report by Simba Information indicates that 24.5 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves ebook readers, and a 2012 Pew Internet study suggests that 33 percent of people in the United States own an e-reader or a tablet. The phase of the most rapid growth is happening now as reader revolutionaries are taking to the streets and subways with their e-readers. As trendsetters and early adopters, they’re being seen, and their ebook reading habits are being copied by others. Ebook-only content is helping the diffusion, as well. The ebook revolution is a bloodless revolution that spans all the acres of the imagination, across all of time and space to everywhere your imagination takes you while you read.

Now, no one ever wrote a paean to flush toilets or refrigerators. No one rang a bell in 1950 during the heyday of the television, and no fireworks went off in 2001 when half the population found themselves on the internet. As far as I know, no one’s ever written a paean to a cell phone or even an ode to the humble wheel. But the invention of ebooks is different. It’s in a rarefied class almost all by itself, because it involves everything aspiring about the human spirit.

The ebook revolution is ultimately about ideas, and in a very real way, we are our ideas. They’re the music that flows through our veins, the jolts of electricity that keep one day from blurring into the next. The revolution in reading has a tangible and noticeable effect on us as a population. The Simba Information report also suggests that a title originally only available as an ebook, Fifty Shades of Grey, may have been partially responsible for a 7 percent year-over-year shift in ebook reading in the U.S. population.

Modern revolutions are more like microrevolutions. Modern political revolutions follow the same trend toward increased speed as innovations. The revolutions are instigated and completed faster than political revolutions of yore. This is related to the fact that we’re online with one another all the time. We’re a connected civilization, and this connection is accelerated more by ebooks than by flush toilets or refrigerators. We’re revolutionaries with one another because we’re linked by ideas, by currents that ripple through our civilization in the books we write and read.

And it’s not just that we have more access to books now or that they’re available almost anywhere within sixty seconds. The ebook revolution also means that we can take what we’ve read, and the ideas that have been sparked, and then communicate them at lightning speed to people all over the world—whether through annotations on the ebook or highlights others can see or social network postings on Facebook or Twitter where we can share an interesting passage from an ebook and our comments about it. Wherever we are and whenever we want, we can talk to others around the globe about a book, as if the world is our reading club and the author our best friend.

When I said earlier that the Kindle was one of the two best inventions of the twenty-first century, I meant the concept of the Kindle, the concept of a portable e-reader and all the ebooks that can be read on it. I think that other devices since the original Kindle have vastly improved its basic features and added new ones. But they are all rooted in the Kindle. In terms of reading, the iPad owes as much to the Kindle as a smartphone owes to the humble rotary phone.

Like the basic Kindle, current eInk e-readers still have a ways to go as actual gadgets. They may never truly compete with multifunction devices like the iPad or Google’s Nexus tablets or even the Kindle Fire released by Amazon. But what we have now is directionally indicative of a future that all book lovers should want to live in, the future of on-demand reading, of having any and every book that’s ever been published available to us no matter where we are.

In fact, some books already exist only in electronic format and offer things that print books can’t, like the ability to be updated every few days. For a number of years, Kindle’s number-one bestseller was a guide to Kindle in ebook-only format by an author who self-published it with Amazon. The author, Stephen Windwalker, updated his book a couple of times a week. Purchasers could redownload the updates at no charge, so they could always have a fresh copy on hand.

This is something that Walt Whitman dreamed about. He revised his greatest collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, nine times in his lifetime, constantly editing and constantly changing the order of poems, adding new ones, and refreshing old ones. He printed this book time and time again at his own expense, which left him broke and barely able to support himself. Even when he was near death, he was only concerned with proofreading his “deathbed” edition. With ebooks, every author can be his or her own Walt Whitman, constantly reclaiming his or her own work by revising it and redistributing it.

Admittedly, today’s distribution network for content updates needs to be improved. As a reader, for example, I have no way of knowing whether a new version of a given book is available on my e-reader. We need a distribution mechanism that works like blogs do to push out updates as they become available and then notify us of them. I’m thinking in particular of the way that the iPad and iPhone show a “badge” on the icon of every application to indicate if there’s an update or if I have new email or if someone tagged me on Facebook. The same idea could apply to ebook content.

This is the great thing about where we are right now. I’m not speaking as a pie-in-the-sky futurist but as someone who sees technological inevitability. Nimble authors and publishers are able to move fast to take advantage of new ebook features—like animation, interactivity, live chat, location tracking, quizzes, and recipe calculators—that are gradually being added on top of existing features. People in publishing who are smart enough to leap on this accumulation of features are finding themselves with hits, because these features aren’t just snazzy eye candy to the digerati, passing memes of the day that get touted in the blogosphere and in some article in Wired magazine. These features work because that’s how people want to consume information, and they want it all in one convenient package.

But this can only happen if authors and their publishers fully embrace the potential that the ebook revolution presents. I’d like to say that all of them have the potential to grasp it. But as I traveled the country, meeting with publishers, authors, and others to evangelize for Kindle, I began to see that this was not true. Some did not get it at all, and you could sense it in everything they said and did about ebooks. But thankfully, others did. These are the companies that I think will not only survive but thrive in the world after the revolution, while the others will look around in wonder at how quickly their once-mighty empires fell.

Bookmark: Inscriptions

I was a bookish kid. I’d blow my weekly allowance at a bookstore at the local mall every Saturday. That’s when the mall’s courts and hallways were occupied by people selling secondhand books. They’d set up shop in front of the comic store and the Orange Julius store, not far from the Spaceport Arcade, where you could always hear the eight-bit battle cries of Donkey Kong. Because the books were used, they were often cheap. Hours after entering the mall, I’d emerge into daylight again with a stuffed knapsack, sometimes too heavy for me to carry on my back. I’d drag it along the sidewalk to my mom’s car like a refugee fleeing a burning library, ash and sparks in the wind behind me, determined to save as much culture as I could.

Among all these books, I’d often find inscriptions on the first or second page to boys and girls I’d never met from aunts and uncles of all stripes and sizes. The inscriptions were often inked—sometimes with a bold hand, sometimes a frail one—and were usually to commemorate an event. A birthday, an anniversary, or (more darkly) a divorce or bereavement.

Inscriptions are a more personal, lasting kind of autograph. When an author autographs your book, he’s often sitting at a table at a book-signing event, working in a rote, mechanical way and hoping to sell enough books by the end of the day to justify his time. It’s vaguely mercantile. But inscriptions are the life-soul of families and can often last longer than the families themselves.

For example, there’s a collection of inscribed Bibles at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Stuck in Dallas for a day due to a long layover, I chanced a trip to SMU and was lucky to peruse its carefully preserved Bibles and see the aging ink in them. Some of these Bibles date back to the 1700s and served in their time as birth records. Frontier families in Texas recorded the names and birth dates of their children, generation after generation. The Bibles give a sense of frontier life, of families living far from hospitals and churches, far from the society of anything but cattle and wolves and the hope for a better life in days to come.

Humble inscriptions are important parts of family history. And yet, if and when my own descendants try to reconstruct their family tree, they’ll be stumped by digital books. Because you see, digital books can’t have inscriptions. I can’t give my girlfriend a digital book and write a note on the front page. Digital books are an extinction event for inscriptions. It’s like what happened with the dinosaurs. Though they ruled the world, once the extinction event happened 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs died off, and there were no more dinosaur bones in the fossil record. Thus it is with digital books. In the digital fossil record, there won’t be any more traces of inscriptions.

It’s almost impossible to trace the life history of a digital good. If you download music illegally from the internet, you have no way of knowing who else owned the music file. It could have changed hands a thousand times, ricocheting from Russia to Serbia to France to the United States, from PC to Mac, from one BitTorrent client to another. Despite its travel, the file is still pristine, original, and untrammeled.

Imagine what a digital passport would look like if it could accompany such a file, stamped and counter-stamped with so many international visas! Unless you crack the file open and re-author it, you can’t put your mark on a digital good. Could you modify an ebook and inscribe it? Yes. Assuming you can crack the ebook open, you can use any number of tools to add a page to an ebook, but doing so is a hurdle. Actually, it’s more like trying to jump over a hurdle while racing uphill in a clown suit and scuba flippers. It’s so hard as to make the effort pointless.

I think we’ve lost something with ebooks in not being able to inscribe them or trace their histories. We’ve lost a way of learning about ourselves and our families. But then, perhaps this loss is compensated for by the rise in social networks, where one day your great-grandkids will be able to download all your tweets and Facebook posts.

Will there be tools to allow you to inscribe ebooks one day? If so, they’ll need to be provided by the retailers and others who control the reading experience of books, and that means Apple, Amazon, and others. You’ll need to rely on these retailers staying in business so that the inscriptions you author stay in their clouds. Once these clouds collapse, the inscriptions will likely be lost forever, unless a company one day provides the service of printing ebooks onto paper and binding them as regular old books.

I can imagine a retro company in Portland or Brooklyn doing this, a company run by hipsters in prim mustaches and fedoras, a boutique company that prints ebooks onto paper in the same way that other Brooklyn boutiques publish print magazines as clay tablets.

Each family has its own story, often partly inscribed in the pages of its books. Does your family have a book with an important inscription? A family Bible? Is a chapter of your own history preserved between the brittle pages of an old book? Care to share your story?