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

No doubt by now you’ve heard of Amazon’s Microbook. It launched a few months ago, and being an early adopter, I was one of the first to buy it, try it out, and write a review.

The company describes the device in their promotional material as follows:

“The Microbook: An e-reader combined with a pico projector and connected to your Kindle account. No power cables. No hassles. No buttons.”

The Microbook is very cheap because it has no screen and no moving parts.

It ships from Amazon’s Japan offices, along with a little robot toy, although I’m not sure why. I can’t read the instructions, but that’s okay. As with any consumer electronics project, I shouldn’t have to. It should just work.

All the Microbook needs is a network connection. My home’s Wi-Fi worked just fine.

Because it was registered to me when I bought it, the Microbook knows who I am and what I’m currently reading. To read, all I need is a blank surface, like a wall or a table. So when I first turn the Microbook on and aim it at the wall, it shows the same page from the same book I’m currently reading on my Kindle.

There are no buttons, but it responds to voice control. “Turn the page,” I say, and the image projected onto the wall changes to the next page. I can also tell it, “Go to the store,” if I want to shop for ebooks.

Privacy is a bit of a problem, but I can read my books on the subway.

You can buy Microbook accessories, like a tripod for hands-free reading or a book with blank pages. This way you can pretend you’re reading a print book.

What I like about it is that I can project the Microbook onto the ceiling at night when I read. It doesn’t get too hot in my hands. And when I turn the Microbook off at night, the Japanese robot lights up its scary eyes.

There is no Microbook, of course. Not yet, anyway. I’m not aware of Amazon or any other retailer with plans for building such a device, but this is one of the ways I myself see the nature of e-readers changing.

When we hold a book or comic or magazine or even an e-reader in our hands, it’s usually a flat object that is taller than it is wide. Most of the surface area is taken up with reading, with the content. But I think this is unnecessary. It’s a waste of electricity to power such a large screen, and the objects are bulky. Besides, who wants to accidentally drop and crack an expensive iPad? I see a future when books can be projected with pico projectors onto walls, tables, and other surfaces.

There are great benefits to be found here. By projecting an ebook onto a surface, you’re not constrained to a fixed size for the reading experience. The screen area could be as big or small as you prefer. Currently, you have to pay a premium for a larger device, whether it’s an iPad over an iPad Mini or a Kindle DX over a regular Kindle.

Another benefit would be that your e-reader is very small and also cheaper, since most of what’s involved in e-readers, in terms of hardware, is related to the screen. In fact, the screen itself is often the most expensive component of a dedicated e-reader, sometimes accounting for as much as half of the price. Get rid of the screen, and you can make a very small, very cheap device. Something perhaps the size of your thumbnail or a USB flash drive. All it would need is a network connection and a small pico projector.

A pico projector is an emerging technology that can beam large images from a miniscule machine. The word “pico” is used here in the sense of a picogram, a measurement the size of one trillionth of a gram. You’d perhaps unfold tiny tripod legs from the projector and aim it at a surface in front of you. Then you’d speak aloud the name of the book you want to read. If you don’t already own it, you’d be prompted to buy it, at which point it would download onto this tiny device and start projecting. You’d navigate by voice commands, and the device would be cloud-powered.

This sort of device could socialize reading by making a book available to you and a close circle of friends. I can see this being used in reading groups, university study groups, or of course, in the privacy of your own bedroom. The biggest benefit of this type of device is its cost. Shrink the surface area of a device down to nothing, and you’ve made a cheap, hands-free reading device.

Of course, you can take this line of thinking further and make Nooks and Kindles really, really cheap. Make them so cheap that you give them away.

I foresee a time when Barnes & Noble, for example, will do just that. Perhaps at first they’ll give Nooks away to people who buy a hundred dollars’ worth of books a year. The retailer benefits because it saves on shipping, and it introduces new segments of its reading marketplace into the Nook experience. As programs like this are more and more successful, and as the manufacturing costs of these slimmed-down, cheaper Nooks drop, Barnes & Noble can afford to give them away to even more people for free. So now people who only spend seventy dollars a year on books—or even fifty dollars a year—can get a free Nook.

Over time, more and more people have Nooks. More and more people are reading. And that’s good. Of course, these slimmed-down, cheaper Nooks are likely bare bones—no web browsing, no music or games, no bells, no whistles. But they’re sufficient for reading itself and serve as a gateway drug to larger, more functional Nooks that Barnes & Noble sells for a steeper price.

If other ebook retailers use this model too, then e-readers will become very prevalent. You’ll finally start to see e-readers in everyone’s hands on subways, at bus stops, or during lunch breaks at work. If disposable e-readers become possible, you could get a new one in the mail every year, with newer features and better screens.

It’s in Amazon’s and everyone else’s best interests to reduce the price of e-readers. This lets them increase the number of customers. Every twenty-dollar drop in price means legions of new customers for whom ebooks now become affordable. And in the final analysis, the logical price is free. Herbert Hoover once promised a chicken in every pot during the Depression, and in our own turbulent financial times, if e-readers are free, you’ll find a Nook in every house—and if not a Nook, then a Sony or a Kindle or even an Apple device.

Just as e-readers are changing, so is the nature of how we read. I joked about privacy concerns with the Microbook. But it’s not just people on the subway who can look over your shoulder at what you read. Retailers like Amazon or Apple can see every page turn and know every word you’ve highlighted, every annotation you’ve made. As you’re reading on your beach chair, a giant looms behind you with a clipboard, peering over your shoulder.

Every so often as we read, our cloud-connected e-readers report back home to notify the retailer about where we are in the book. This is often done so that if you have multiple devices, you can sync all devices to the same page. But this also lets retailers like Amazon and Apple know how far you’ve read through a given ebook. They’re able to monitor the progress you make. The information on reading patterns for a given ebook can be collected across multiple people, and the retailers can learn which ebooks were more successful. Do people abandon a given book halfway through? Is one particular chapter often skipped?

This information isn’t yet being used to target your personal reading habits, but the reading patterns across multiple people for a given book could be used by the retailers—and sold back to publishers—to improve the quality of a given ebook. Perhaps the chapter that was often skipped needed to be better edited or needed an illustration to help explain what was going on. Or if the book is often abandoned partway through, then perhaps the publisher takes this information into account when it’s time to renegotiate the author contract.

We’re not yet at the point where ads will be targeted to you based on the paragraph or sentence you’re currently reading, although Google does target ads to you if you’ve mentioned specific books, and Facebook’s platform allows advertisers to do the same. Still, I think many readers are comfortable with this intrusion into their privacy, especially if it means better ebook prices. So I can imagine free ebooks that are 100 percent ad subsidized. You get these ebooks for free, but the catch is that on the bottom of every page, you see a contextual ad, perhaps based on the content on that page or perhaps based on your own web-surfing habits on the internet.

It’s easy for retailers to serve ads to you across multiple websites. Ads are sticky, like cockroaches dipped in honey, and you can’t quite get rid of them. It may not be long before you start to see those same sticky ads following you around on your ebooks. But until then, I think that your reading privacy will only be bent to provide statistics back to publishers, in the way I just outlined. If this ultimately serves to make for better-designed ebooks, and we as readers are oblivious to the way this data is being used, then perhaps there’s no harm to us in the process. For now.

I mention the pico-projector e-reader as an example of the kind of disruptive hardware technology we may see in the years ahead. The future of ebooks is just getting started, after all. Lots of new technology will be coming to e-readers. Some types use organic crystals woven into intricate patterns or arranged in spirals. Some work like the wings on a butterfly, reflecting light at the right frequencies to reproduce full color. E-reader technology is an area of ongoing innovation, and the devices that will be out in just a couple of years will make existing eInk displays look like Edison’s wax cylinders.

Eventually, e-readers may get so cheap that they’re unprofitable for retailers to sell. That makes you wonder whether they’ll continue to be sold. But consider the history of razor blades.

In 1895, an inventor named King Gillette turned away from his architectural drawings of futuristic cities and utopias and hit on an idea for a new kind of razor. It took him ten years before he could manufacture them, but they were revolutionary. Instead of having to buy a razor blade and sharpen it before every use, you could buy reusable razor handles and disposable steel razor blades from Gillette. When the blades got dull, you just bought new ones. Gillette took a loss on every razor handle he sold. But what good is a handle without a blade? None at all, so he made a tidy profit on every blade he sold.

Using this as a metaphor, you might ask whether a given retailer is in business to sell razors or blades. I say the answer is both. In truth, ebooks and e-readers are part of the flywheel for any ebook retailer. You can’t sell content without a reader, and you can’t sell readers without content, so you need both.

No company can rest on its laurels yet and just focus on ebook content while letting the others provide the readers. Even Google ended up launching its own smartphone and tablet. Although there are challenges and pains that you go through as an organization to build out a device and the profit margin may not be high, by owning the reading experience at the hardware level, you can do things with content that no one else can.

Recent events have already shown that a retailer will take a loss on hardware if the content can make up for it in sales. For example, when Amazon released the Kindle Fire, an inexpensive tablet that could compete with Apple’s iPad, many manufacturing pundits believed that Amazon was losing money on every Kindle Fire it sold as a piece of hardware but was making up the balance on content sales. It was a brilliant business decision later mirrored by inexpensive e-reader tablets from Amazon’s competitors.

The same will hold true for future e-readers. If anything, prices will drop to levels so scary that corporate accountants and decision-makers at major retailers will need to have nerves of steel.

Bookmark: Lost Libraries

In doing research for this book, I wanted to watch old TV episodes of Oprah to find the day when Oprah discussed the Kindle with Jeff Bezos. It was a pivotal day for Kindle. Based on her show, the original Kindle sold out forever. In its way, the interview between Jeff and Oprah was a unique moment in history—for books, anyway. Between the two of them, Jeff and Oprah had done more than anyone else to promote and sell books in this century. You’d have to go back a hundred years to find another person who singlehandedly had as much impact on reading, and that was Andrew Carnegie, who opened 2,500 free libraries around the country at a time when American libraries were closed to the public.

But just a mere two years after the Oprah show aired, it’s no longer available anywhere on the internet or even the undernet. The show had a daily viewership in the millions, but it isn’t available anymore, with the exception of occasional bootleg clips here and there, like bits of papyrus buried in the Egyptian desert of the internet.

Media has a surprisingly short shelf life. For example, only four of the films of Theda Bara survive. The others are all gone, lost. Theda Bara was the original Hollywood vamp, one of the most massively popular actresses in all of movie history. In 1917, her film Cleopatra had the biggest budget of any film up to that point, $500,000, and that was at the end of World War I! And yet, all that remains of the film and Theda’s risqué outfits is a smudgy, five-second clip that was rescued from the vaults of the film studio as it was burning down decades later.

Theda Bara isn’t unique in this sense. Only ninety seconds of footage exists from one of the first animated movies, The Centaurs, made ten years before Disney came onto the scene. One of the first Westerns, Devil Dog Dawson, only survives as a thirty-eight-second fragment, found by accident in a mislabeled film can in Ohio. The first Technicolor film, On with the Show, a crowning success that raked in the modern equivalent of $2 billion in revenues, is now completely lost, although somehow, absurdly, a twenty-second color clip was found in a toy projector in the 1970s.

History was harsh with Theda Bara and a lot of other silent film stars, but it’s just as harsh with books. If you look back to the ancient world, there were three major libraries. First and foremost was the library of Alexandria in Egypt with about half a million volumes, then the library of Pergamum in Greece with 200,000 books, and then finally the library of Harran in Turkey. These three libraries held most of the books of the ancient world, and scholars still gnash their teeth and tear out their hair thinking about all the conquerors in the intervening centuries who dumped these books into rivers or burned them for fuel.

The story of books in the ancient world is a sad one. Anthony dismantled the library of Pergamum as a wedding present to Cleopatra. He emptied the shelves and sent all the books to Alexandria. But that library didn’t last long, because it was repeatedly decimated by fires and finally Islamic conquest. The only sizeable collection of books from the ancient world survived in Harran, a dusty outpost in Turkey where all the scholars fled from Egypt and Greece with their books. The books stayed hidden there until Arab scholars rediscovered and retranslated them, leading in part to the Renaissance of knowledge around Gutenberg’s time.

The fate of these ancient libraries is instructive and offers models of what might happen with corporate mergers and ebooks. Is it too hard to imagine a future where Google and Apple merge and combine their vast ebook libraries—only to suffer the slings and arrows of corporate fortune and go bankrupt one day, the books disappearing as the servers get shut down and rust, as distant data centers become overgrown with ivy and vines? Perhaps Amazon survives for a while before it, in turn, is acquired by some future new-media company, its ebooks relegated to an archive, perhaps to survive, perhaps not.

What would it be like to live in a future where all media is consolidated under one company? Not only would that company be able to set arbitrarily high prices on content, but it could also bury any content in its vaults, effectively censoring it. And what would it be like if that company failed, went bankrupt, or worse, lost its media archives? What if all the content was destroyed, perhaps through a massive server outage or an act of internal sabotage by a disgruntled employee or a digital ebook-eating virus?

Such a loss is too catastrophic to consider. But it could happen. Technological obsolescence not only happens to hardware and software, but also to institutions. After all, there were only three major libraries in the ancient world—and only one of them survived long enough for its books to be retranslated and preserved. Likewise, there are only three major digital media retailers now—Apple, Amazon, and Google. Which of these three, if any, do you think will survive? Fast-forward a hundred years: what do you think it would be like if one company monopolized our media?