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

The ebook revolution is ultimately about culture change. It’s about the impact of digital books on our civilization and what ebooks mean for you and for future generations. Are digital books an improvement, an advancement that will change how we read and absorb information and ideas? Or were we better off with the printed form, the dusty books we’ve held and loved throughout our lives?

The answer, of course, is yes to both questions.

Digital books are the closest we’ve ever come to Plato’s ideal world. They’re immaculate and reborn fresh every time they’re downloaded to a new device, like Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Because of this, digital books are a great fit for schools. Ebooks never get lost or defaced. Schools no longer need to replace books if they’re the casualties in a food fight or if the proverbial dog ate them along with a child’s homework. It’s going to be a lot harder to blame a dog for eating your ebook or hard drive.

Children are highly adaptable by nature, and with the exception of the almost blind, I’ve never met a child of reading age who couldn’t get into an ebook. As adults we may prefer to cling like Socrates to the old way. But trust me, we can all “get into” an ebook. There’s no barrier in the brain to reading once you’re engaged with a book. And if you say there is, if you genuinely feel that you can’t get into an ebook, then it’s probably not written well. If you give yourself a chance, you can adapt to the ebook experience. Children who are brought into ebooks now have the golden opportunity to start fresh without any preconceptions.

Now, I mention Socrates because he’s relevant to this discussion about the barrier between new and old ways of reading. If you think there’s a divide now about reading print books versus digital books, consider that in Socrates’s time, there was an argument about the value of reading itself.

Socrates was born into an oral culture, and his teachers taught him through dialogues, which were texts that they had memorized. Socrates learned early on to challenge and question those texts. He was the last philosopher of Greece’s oral culture.

His student Plato was brought up in the oral culture but had learned to read. Ironically, it’s only through Plato that we know about Socrates, because Socrates didn’t believe in writing. He never learned it and never wanted to commit himself to paper. Plato disobeyed his teacher and secretly wrote down Socrates’s teachings.

In his day, Socrates was one of the most respected (and notorious!) teachers of them all, which is why I think his words are appropriate here. He lived in a time of incredible change, when the Greek alphabet itself was first developed. (That’s an amazing innovation in its own right, right up there with hyperlinks as one of civilization’s most mysterious and unexpected inventions.)

While writing existed before the Greek alphabet was invented, there were no vowels. Greek writing, though, was invented with a one-to-one correspondence between letters in the alphabet and sounds that people would pronounce. Greek was simplicity itself. It was immensely efficient in a way that any Amazon engineer would appreciate. And yet Socrates still railed against it! (Although, keep in mind that Socrates was also skeptical of pockets and preferred, like many others in ancient Greece, to keep his money in his mouth. This is true. He would often hold his money in his mouth while walking around and take it out to talk.)

The arguments Socrates had against reading are relevant and deep, and you should get to know them. He argued that by reading, we were too lazy with what we learned. We would say that we had learned something because we read it, but we hadn’t actually pondered or questioned it the way he would, the way someone in an oral culture would when memorizing a text, by constantly listening to it and internalizing it and gradually challenging or accepting it. Socrates felt that this act of questioning was of supreme importance to personal growth.

Although I’m an ebook evangelist, in many ways I agree with Socrates, because there’s more to school than memorizing facts. I’m of the opinion that a dialogue process is important with any book, that you need to wrestle with the book (or ebook) and what the author is trying to say.

The same arguments Socrates made about reading itself apply to the digital. He’d be out in the streets right now, complaining about the lack of critical skills in children and their inability to think critically about what they read on the web. You might want to read what Socrates said in the Phaedrus and come to your own conclusions about whether we should read and how. If after that you still believe in reading, then there’s no barrier to digital reading.

If you look at the true importance of what books mean to our culture—and I mean human culture, all culture—then books, in many ways, are what separate us from other animals. Books educate. They convey culture. With a book you can set down all your wisdom and accumulated learning for posterity, and others can read your book long after you’ve passed on and still learn from you. This is how cultures grow—exponentially fast.

You can’t get this without writing. It’s just that simple. There’s a limit to what you can teach person to person through conversation alone and to what the listener can remember and build on from their recollections. And true, you can still say a lot in an oral culture such as preliterate Greece, the same culture that gave birth to Homer and his incredible blind recitations, inspired poetry of the Iron Age.

Homer’s poems were entirely oral, and like him, a diminishing number of preliterate poets still recite heroic oral stories and thus convey the core concepts that define their cultures—concepts like nobility, fighting for what’s right, and truth and justice. But it’s much harder to educate someone about the art of metallurgy or statecraft through an epic poem. It’s nearly impossible to teach medicine or any other science without having a text, something large enough and capable enough to hold the sheer volume of details.

We’re unique as a species, we humans, because we created books as educational tools to augment the little that we can convey orally from person to person. There’s as much of a distance between our Stone Age ancestors and the preliterate Greeks as there is between the Greeks of Homer’s age and the literate billions who now inhabit the earth.

Language is responsible for an explosion of culture and vibrancy and human richness, but it was made exponentially richer by writing, whether in the form of books or scrolls or cuneiform tablets. We’re not born with all of our culture’s teachings inside our heads, the way animals are born, the way animals know instinctively what to eat or what the shadows of their predators look like. Animals rely on instinct, but we rely on being educated, on stories and tales told by mothers to their children or grandchildren. We put these stories down in books so they can educate any number of generations who follow, and we rely on these stories.

We’re born with enormous brains, but we’re born without instincts for self-preservation. Baby ponies and lambs can start walking and eating a few hours after they’re born, but we take years to do the same. Large as they are, our eggshell-fragile skulls are too small when we’re born to hold the wealth and weight of our culture, and it’s not passed down through the generations by instinct alone. We rely on culture to teach us even the most basic things, like how to groom ourselves or bathe or eat and drink. And likewise more sophisticated skills, like hunting or agriculture. These cultural inventions are learned and taught, in turn, to the next generation through books.

We’ve come far in our culture, to the point that we now have digital books and can pick one from millions on a whim and begin reading it in a minute. The pace of technological change—though thrilling—is often confusing. And you can feel like you’re never quite caught up. You can subscribe to a hundred news feeds, if you know how to do that, and you still won’t be caught up, because the pace of technological change outpaces even specialists in the field.

It’s no wonder that a lot of the people I talk to are confused by ebooks. They don’t know which way to turn, which page to turn, which e-reader to use, or why they should even use them. And I totally empathize about how confusing technology can be. But technology is just a tool, like hammers and nails, although fussier, more prone to crashing, and more in need of firmware updates and special USB cables.

Once you get your head behind the ebook revolution, once you untangle yourself from all the different power cords and USB cords and actually start reading an ebook, I think you’ll realize as I did how useful these books are for culture, for reading. Ebooks, more than print books, offer an immediacy of meaning. After all, a dictionary is built into most e-readers, so the definition of an unfamiliar word is usually just one click away.

If this alone isn’t an educational improvement, then consider communal annotations and how they help readers to understand a digital textbook better. Each reader can make their own annotations to the same digital book, and all annotations across multiple readers can be added together. Some e-readers, like Amazon’s, show you the number of times that a given passage has been annotated. There’s often a wisdom to crowds, and in many cases, the most frequently annotated lines in a book are the most salient, the most useful for learning that chapter’s point.

This, though, is the paradox of ebooks: if you accept that children should read and that ebooks can teach as much as a print book, why didn’t we digitize textbooks first? Because we didn’t. Instead, we digitized fiction, sci-fi, romances, The New York Times bestsellers, and yes, pornography. Stuff we knew we could sell. But it’s content that hasn’t reached children in a significant way.

This is the central paradox of our ebook revolution: digital content won’t really succeed until it’s part of our culture from a very early age, and I mean from first grade onward, from the time children start reading. E-readers need to be flexible and sophisticated enough in their features to allow that. Right now, they’re just not adequate.

There are some neat experiments—as I write this, for example, I have friends in the publishing industry who have quit their jobs in Manhattan and gone to work in Silicon Valley for a company that builds e-readers for students. These devices have two folding screens, side by side like pages in a book, that allow you to write and scribble and draw and download and read books.

Tech experiments like this are what we need to really make education work digitally. And until we do that, ebooks will be something that’s bolted on to our culture. Ebooks won’t really be part of our culture until we’re raised with them, until we’re digital natives who stare with newborn eyes at these phosphorescent eInk displays.

Of course, a part of me yearns for good old-fashioned print books. And if I ever had a child, I can see how difficult it would be for me to choose whether to let the child read ebooks or use a computer or even have a smartphone. I’m sensitive to these issues, and a lot of parents I talk to also are worried that their kids will be distracted from reading by videos or social networking apps on an iPad or screeching monkeys in a game built into an ebook.

Teachers are worried too.

Professors are bemoaning the loss of critical thinking skills in today’s students and the loss of active reading skills. When we passively consume content, lazily let our brains stop doing the hard work of reading, and turn instead to the distractions of tweets and games, we’re changing our brains. We are what we eat, and the same is true of our digital diet. We are the media we consume, distractions and all. In the Stone Age, our ancestors listened to birdsong and bee hum, and that was media enough for their minds. Then we developed song and story. But now we’re no longer content with the oral tradition, as Socrates was, nor are we content with reading and writing. We want distractions. And we want digital distractions most of all, because they’re convenient, downloadable to our devices in under sixty seconds.

In fact, our habits for digital distractions and passive content consumption are putting us in danger of becoming a new species.

I’m not saying that we’re going to become robotic Cylons. But we are in danger of becoming a species whose brains are wired totally differently than the humans who came before us. A species that can’t reason critically, can’t engage in active imagination, and can’t read into a mystery and figure out who murdered the butler before the novel ends. With the increasing interconnectedness that our devices afford us, this new species is likely to be much more social, like hyperactive orangutans on Facebook. I can’t say what this new rewired species is ultimately capable of. Socrates himself couldn’t say what the future of reading and writing would hold. He just rejected it wholesale.

We don’t need to reject digital culture altogether. We just need to be careful. Stick to dedicated experiences and be wary of digital distractions. Set a time limit for the amount of time you or your children use in consuming media. Resist the impulse to tweet something every ten minutes. (It takes your brain at least twenty minutes to focus itself again after a distraction.)

It’s easy to say that digital content is not a good thing, especially for a developing child. I myself once believed this. But now I think this is overly simplistic. If you’re objecting to the new merely because it’s new, you become an old stick-in-the-mud like Socrates.

Just as there was a gap between oral and written cultures in the generation between Socrates and Plato, there’s a gap now between analog and digital cultures. All of us sit squarely between both analog and digital cultures. We were raised on TV and print books, but we also had computers and the internet. We see the allure of the digital culture but still remember what it was like to use public pay phones. We’re hybrids. Neither fully analog nor fully digital, we’re able to pause on the brink of this digital gap and look fondly back to phonebooks and pennies and other ephemera of an analog era. But now we turn toward the digital future, toward credit cards instead of cash and ebooks instead of print. The digital culture is upon us, and our children will be the heirs to a fully digital culture.

What will the future of education hold?

It’s more than simply taking old print metaphors and making them digital. The future of education isn’t about virtual blackboards or playing learning games as a kind of digital recess. I actually think we’re going to see more social elements in education. And let’s just accept the inevitable: social networks like Facebook and Twitter will be available for children at some point soon.

So why not, for example, encourage schools to post lesson plans and homework assignments to a child’s Facebook account? If children collaborate online about their homework assignment, so much the better. Most of what we do at work is collaborative. Why not encourage social education and make ebook widgets to enable this?

I recently got a chance to watch some college students studying for their finals. They came up with a new way of studying together by connecting over Skype and chat and sharing screenshots of the ebooks they were reading. What makes this interesting is that these weren’t students studying together in the same dorm room or library but around the globe—in Dubai, Singapore, London, and Seattle. They cobbled together this setup themselves, without any help or guidance from professors.

It’s important to worry about the future of education in a digital ebook-enabled world, especially if you have children, but I don’t think the future’s bleak. Instead, I think it’s full of possibility. When I put on my futurist’s hat, I see social connections everywhere inside ebooks. But even with all these social features, I think you’ll be able to curl up with a familiar book and turn off all the naysayers and chitchatters in the margins of your book. You will always be able to turn off the popular highlights. You will always be able to unplug from the network and enjoy a book like you always did before, in a golden hour of sunshine with a great read.

Bookmark: Book Covers

There’s a mysterious man on the subway. He’s reading a book that you’ve read. There’s something roguish or attractive about him that you can see in his face and in the way he carries himself, even though he’s half hidden by the book he’s reading. You’re interested or maybe just tipsy enough to go over and talk to him. You casually point to that book he’s reading, the one you’ve read too. And you start a conversation.

It’s a scenario most of us have played out before, whether as the one approached or the one using the book as a pretext to get to know someone. Some of us have even met future husbands or wives this way.

The Spanish have a term for a chaperone who sometimes accompanies a couple on their first date: the chaperone is a dueño if it’s a man, a dueña if it’s a woman. The ebook revolution has killed the dueño of reading: the book cover. You’ll no longer be able to have Gabriel García Márquez or Jane Austen chaperone you through your first hesitant and shy conversation as you talk as strangers about books you are reading, hoping perhaps for more intimacy or a longer conversation to get to know one another better. That’s because book covers are already a casualty of the digital age.

Ebooks make a token concession to book covers in two ways. The first is by letting you see the cover on the web page where the ebooks are sold. The second is by often including the cover within the ebook itself. (However, some e-readers like Kindle skip right past the cover and go straight to where the book starts at chapter one.)

The demise of the book cover is a sad one, especially when you consider that many covers are works of art, as well as historical artifacts. Just consider the wild colors and bold lines of 1920s Russian book covers by Alexander Rodchenko, the lurid romance covers of the 1980s that featured Fabio, or even the way any book cover would fade to muted shades of blue if the book was out in the sun for too long in a storefront window. That’s all gone now.

But you also have to consider that artistic book covers as we now know them are recent innovations. They’ve only been around for a hundred years. Before then, if a book had a cover at all, it was simply functional and undecorated, made to protect the book from excess wear and tear. At best, the covers would be gilt and hand-tooled from leather. They were symbolic encrustations of wealth rather than functions of advertising.

With digital books, though, you won’t be able to catch a glimpse of the book that the airplane passenger sitting next to you is reading, so you won’t be able to strike up a conversation quite as quickly. There’s hope, though. I saw a recent tech innovation that lets you slip an iPhone into a special eInk sleeve so you can see images on both sides, and I thought it would be an amazing opportunity to show off book covers again, to beam the cover of the book you’re reading onto the face of the device for everyone to see. And perhaps it won’t be long before future tablets have glass screens on both sides that let you do the same thing. Maybe e-readers will start to show the book covers as screensavers. But there’s a silver lining to the loss of book covers: the actual text of the book itself will come more to the forefront.

I can see a time when people will browse for books based on the content of the book, not the cover. Retailers will rank books for you based on the interior text. They’ll automatically assess what a book’s about and present the information to you when you need to make a purchasing decision. The loss of covers means that when you think back to an ebook you enjoyed, you’ll perhaps recall more of the content of the book than the cover. You’ll solidify more of the book’s meaning in your mind rather than conjure up an image of the cover (which, by the way, is often created by a graphic designer who has never even read the book).

Still, for me at least, it’s devastating how ebook covers are an appendix-like afterthought, tacked into books but rarely seen. At best, you see book covers on your e-reader’s virtual bookshelf, but they’re micro-sized and just a couple of pixels wide. I hate to say it, but I don’t want to see book covers disappear! I’m almost tempted to wallpaper the inside of my home with book covers so I can be reminded of all my former books, all of them as familiar to me as friends. Because somehow, whenever I see a book with my mind’s eye, I don’t recall the text inside or abstract ideas it may have contained, but I do see the cover. For me, in a very real way, the cover is the book.

Am I alone in my appreciation of book covers? Let me know what you think about them, for good or for bad. And let me know what your favorite book cover is or any ideas you have for salvaging book covers in the digital age!