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

Take a walk, if you will, through a university library, through one of the areas where nobody ever goes, like the section on 1870s foreign literature. Northwestern University outside of Chicago has a great library, and if you peruse its desolate dusty sections, you’ll chance upon tomes from the era when books were bound with intricate marbled covers, a book-binding tradition that sadly is in decline. If you’re lucky enough to find such a marbled book, you’ll perhaps marvel at all its whorls and frothy bubbles, at all the inky emulsions! And the smells, the deliciously antique smell of old books, so musty, so brittle, so familiar but so sad.

A Kindle or iPad will never smell quite so lovely in its decline. If anything, it will smell of polyethylene and be frazzled like an overheated hair dryer. If it’s white, it will take on the vaguely urine-colored tint that all old plastic gets when it ages.

But no e-reader will last as long as any book you’ll find in a library. Kobos and Nooks and other devices will be relegated to sock drawers and trash bins, or lost in the garage sales and swap meets of techno-commodity fetishism. Devices like the Kindle have a lot of sales appeal, but only for a limited lifespan.

While the Kindle1 had such great demand in 2007 that it sold out in five hours and sold on eBay for 400 percent of the original price, it’s doubtful that you could sell a Kindle1 today. There’s always a later and greater device on the market. Companies who manufacture consumer products know this and design with this technical obsolescence in mind. As they’re manufacturing the device that will hit the shelves tomorrow, they’re already at work on its replacement.

While the reading hardware may age, the ebook content—being digital—is eternal. And likewise, because it’s digital, it’s possible to have a near-infinite number of copies of a given digital book. Perversely, though, your local library is only likely to have a handful of copies of a given digital book. Why is this?

Libraries have a fixed budget every year for what books they can purchase. So whether a given library wants to buy a print or a digital copy of a book, it’s still going to have to pay for that book. That means that if you’re late returning an ebook, you may still have to pay late fees (or, more humanely, the ebook will simply turn itself off and return to the library for another patron to use, even if you weren’t finished reading it). This is because only a fixed number of patrons at a time can borrow the ebook from a library.

So even though digital inventory is infinite—even though all the patrons of the library could, in theory, download the same copy of the ebook at the same time, licensing terms will prohibit that from happening. Yes, you’ll still have to reserve a digital ebook, just as you do a print book. The real benefit is that you’ll be able to check out and download your library ebooks from anywhere. You’re not going to need to go to a library to do that.

Libraries are always budget-constrained, and you’re going to start seeing less and less shelf space dedicated to print books, because they’re costly to maintain, rebind, stack, and insure. In an effort to save space and preserve shrinking resources, libraries will trend toward becoming miniature clouds of their own, collections of hard drives with all these ebooks on them. Perhaps the librarians themselves will become digital avatars of their former selves too, giving you online advice on which ebooks to read or which electronic encyclopedias and resources to use.

What will it mean as we lose this personal touch? Will we want to seek advice from an algorithm? Will we appreciate it if librarians are outsourced to a call center in the Philippines and there’s no personal touch? No. I think we’ll come to regret this loss. Whenever I visit my favorite library at the University of New Mexico, I find the librarians eager to help and anxious to please. I like the personal touch, the care they provide, and I believe we should work to embrace and preserve their crucial role as gatekeepers and conveyors of information.

I’m somewhat skeptical of the idea of digital librarians or digital libraries. Perhaps it’s because some of the best years of my life were spent in libraries, surrounded by books. I really do love print books. I spent a lot of my childhood at the county library every Saturday, and I learned more from the MIT library than I ever did from my professors. I was so open in my reading attitudes that I would devour everything. Fiction, math books, history—it was all tasty. To this day, I still spend hours walking through the racks of libraries, poking through their basement stacks, and looking for interesting or esoteric tomes. Libraries offer a sense of discovery like no other.

Still, I was thrilled when my local library finally figured out how to offer ebooks to patrons. That night, I maxed out my library card and downloaded twenty books. The selection might still be small—only a few tens of thousands of ebooks—but I found abundant reading material. I ordered a pizza, stayed in, and read all night long—sheer bliss! And I love the convenience of being able to beam the books directly to my Kindle, instead of lugging them back from my local branch in the back of my pickup truck.

For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you. Some books whisper, some shout, and some seem to speak for no reason whatsoever. But I’m sensitive to the way they all sound, all these voices that stay mute until you open the covers and start reading.

I’m glad to see libraries embracing the promise of digital books, even though such books mean a threat of sorts to their continued existence—at least, the existence that libraries currently imagine for themselves. Because the charter of libraries is changing. Digital content is causing libraries to change now, just as newspapers changed ten years ago. For newspapers to thrive now, they have to target their local audiences. The ads need to be local, and so do the stories. Local papers can’t maintain staff reporters to investigate events abroad anymore, and they don’t need to. They focus on what’s local.

Libraries can do the same. They can succeed by digitizing and making available local periodicals, historical archives, and books by regional authors. That’s how they can differentiate themselves and stay afloat. In contrast, there’s usually nothing local about a best-selling paperback. These more popular trade books are great candidates for being offered through a centralized, nationwide library service that local libraries can pay into.

As it stands now, individual libraries can sign up with a company called Overdrive to offer lendable ebooks—but many choose not to, for budget reasons. Having to provide print and digital books to patrons is a financial burden. I think the sooner we can accelerate the adoption of digital books, the better it will be for libraries and the more likely that some of the smaller libraries—often with great regional and local treasures—will survive into the decades ahead.

That said, I think there’s one little-considered adjunct to libraries that will likely fade with the widespread adoption of ebooks, and that’s the humble bookmobile.

On Main Street America, the bookmobile is as much a fixture as the ice cream truck, trundling down shady streets on summer afternoons, bringing library books to kids all over the country. In a digital age, it’s hard to imagine a future for the bookmobile, except perhaps as an avant-garde piece of installation art from the past. It’s not likely that the truck will drive down the streets letting the kids borrow digital books and download them onto their iPad minis, effectively zapping the children with ebooks.

In spite of the bookmobile’s demise, libraries as a whole have a great future. I elaborate in the next “bookmark” about bookworms and how libraries are likely to become instrumental as cultural safeguards of books, as a check against rampant retailer sales practices and possible censorship. There’s no better time than now to dust off your library card and check out some great ebooks to read on your iPad or Nook. You do have a library card, don’t you? I’ve been using mine so much recently that I’ve memorized the twenty-digit bar code.

And I’ve fallen so much in love with my local library that I might just hug the librarian the next time I stop by.

For now, books can be preserved forever in digital form, like pressed violets between pages of an ebook in the cloud. As long as our ebooks can keep pace with changing file formats and are duplicated enough to avoid loss through hard-drive crashes, their future is assured.

The ebook revolution allows us, once and for all, to know ourselves. As a culture, we no longer need to fear death. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence will live on in digital form, even if the aging originals in Washington, DC, turn too brittle to read. We no longer need to fear culture loss—assuming, of course, that there’s no futuristic form of library burning through selective viruses that attack a library’s data center and preferentially wipe out ebooks, like digital Huns or Vandals.

Bookmark: Bookworms

Ebooks don’t get viruses—not yet, anyway. Your own computer might succumb to a virus that turns it into a spambot zombie sending Viagra emails all over the globe or that monitors your keystrokes and sends your credit card numbers overseas. But your ebooks are safe. Until a nanovirus is made that can burrow through plastic and glass and eat away at resistors and diodes, the bookworm is an insect of the past.

I, for one, am glad I’ll never have to see bookworms again. In the summer of 2000, I packed up all my belongings and put them in a storage facility in Boston before taking an international job assignment for a couple of years. Little did I know that just a few months after I left Boston, the storage facility would be flooded and my belongings on the basement floor pretty much ruined.

When I came back three years later in a moving van and saw the intricate colonies of fungus and rot on the walls, I was in despair. I opened up brittle cardboard boxes to find books whose pages were punctuated by insect tunnels and running lines of blue mold like antifreeze fluid. I lost hundreds of books, more than you’d find in an average public school library. It was devastating.

Culturally, though, we still face deterioration and loss of our content, although it’s at the hands of something bigger than bookworm beetles. I’ll put it to you like this: In the old days of antiquity, the works of Cicero and Plato were copied by hand, and because the copying took so long, scribes had to be choosy about what they preserved. If they didn’t like a given book or didn’t have enough parchment, they wouldn’t copy it.

Because of this, we’ve lost a tragic number of works from antiquity.

• Aeschylus only survives in 10 percent of his seventy known works. The rest are now lost. Another playwright, Sophocles, only survives into the twenty-first century with 5 percent of his works.

• Only half of Euclid’s math books survive. Perhaps one of the missing books was an early work of calculus? If it had been more widely circulated in its day, maybe we’d have had computers by the Middle Ages and Greek colonies on the moon by now.

• Julius Caesar not only had time to defeat the French and become Rome’s first emperor, but he also wrote fifteen books, of which only a third now survive.

• The Old Testament used to be much larger, with 46 percent of it now missing. As many as twenty-one lost books are referenced in the Bible (such as the Acts of Solomon and the Book of the Wars of the Lord). There are probably more that we don’t even know about because the Bible never mentions them.

• Shakespeare fared better, with 93 percent of his works surviving, but even living as he did in the age of the printing press, at least three of his plays are lost, perhaps for good.

This same kind of blight can affect us with ebooks. If you take the long view of history and agree that wars and economic collapses and the redrawing of nations’ lines will continue to happen, and that technologies will continue to shift, then it’s inevitable that some of our ebooks will also one day become lost. But now, the magnitude for loss is much greater.

If a company like Google or Apple goes under, they might take all their books with them. It takes a lot to power a cloud, to keep all these ebooks humming in their hives. So in a large-scale book blight, there’s as much chance that my aunt’s book about her favorite cat will be preserved for posterity as that a book by J.K. Rowling might be. In fact, I would argue that an author’s best strategy is to avoid making her works exclusive to any one retailer, that it’s best to put your eggs in multiple baskets.

We can’t read the future, but the opportunity for a wholesale book blight through negligence or gradual decay or decline in entertainment habits is greater now than ever before. Even if it’s not caused by bookworms.

There are steps we could take to safeguard all our books from blight, of course. Libraries already excel in this respect, and as long as libraries continue to hold on to their own content and do not rely on the vaults of retailers, they can continue to help. In fact, there’s an initiative called the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) that aims to do this.

Led by a Harvard librarian, the DPLA aims to compete in a way with the Google Book project. Millions of volumes will still be digitized, but the libraries will be in charge, and independent readers worldwide can freely access digital holdings on their smartphones or computers. The DPLA is still in its early years, but its efforts—as well as those of similar projects, such as the World Digital Library project funded by the U.S. Library of Congress and UNESCO—may be the safeguards we need.

Librarians are unlikely heroes. Who would have thought that librarians would come to our culture’s rescue, averting disaster and a literary bookocalypse?

That said, sadly, there isn’t a single library from classical antiquity that has survived. I mention the top three such libraries in a later chapter, but there were other, smaller ones. They were all destroyed, with the possible exception of the personal library of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—and that only “survived” because it was buried under a hundred feet of hardened lava from an erupting volcano. About 1,800 scrolls “survive” in carbonized form. (Think of Han Solo frozen into a black block in Star Wars, or think of leaving a book at the site of an atom bomb explosion.) These scrolls aren’t being read anytime soon.

We face the same problem of long-term survival with digitization efforts. Even if a book is digitized, will its file format survive? Will hardware even exist that can read it one day, centuries from now? Will the old Kindle or Nook in your desk drawer somehow survive the eons intact and surface again as a kind of Rosetta Stone that can be used to finally read and decipher troves of ebooks? Am I being too pessimistic in my worries for the future, or do you think we’re not collectively worried enough about book blight?