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

Working at Amazon was like taking a step back in time to Seattle’s pioneer roots, back when Seattle was the gateway to the Yukon gold rush. Working on Kindle was like living in the Wild West.

For projects that broke new ground, like Kindle, there didn’t seem to be any law, any sheriff, or any real consequences for making wrong decisions, because nobody knew the right ones. People seemed to wear their six-shooters out in the open, taking potshots at one another while hiding behind Donkey Kong machines. When vice presidents argued in the hallways, trigger fingers twitching, I could almost imagine a tumbleweed blowing between them.

It was also impossible to tell reality from fiction. No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, and no ideas were off the table. Nothing was too strange to consider. People who thought fast often got their way and ruled the day. It was an early Wild West of ideas and innovation. It was crazy and anarchic, and I liked it.

Download a copy of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It’s the book that all of Kindle’s hardware code names came from. The book is about a character named Fiona and her “illustrated primer,” a machine designed to look like a book but with links to all libraries, all TV shows, and all human knowledge. (Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.) The book is a treasure trove of other code names for Kindle hardware: Nell, Miranda, and Turing.

So the first time I got a Kindle, it wasn’t called a Kindle but a “Fiona.”

Though primitive by today’s standards, my original Kindle—one of the first Fionas made for select Amazon employees—still works like a charm. True, my Fiona is turning the yellow-gray color of smokers’ teeth, the same way that once white yesteryear computers start to turn an upsetting beige. But it still works, even though it’s been manhandled and chucked many times into my backpack, tossed into many suitcases for trans-Atlantic flights, and left on my truck’s dashboard in the sun for months. And once while walking through Cupertino, California—a city where everyone drives—I got hit by a car while crossing the street, because nobody expects pedestrians in the heart of Silicon Valley. I fell and sprained my arm. But even though my Fiona clattered to the street and got run over by one of the car’s wheels, it still works as great as always.

Needless to say, I love my Kindle.

My original Kindle job had me creating and managing the ebook conversion process—the messy method by which print books are turned into digital ones.

When thinking about how ebooks are created, it’s best to envision a sausage factory. Meat comes in one end, machinery packages it, and sausage comes out the other end. At the ebook factory, you start in the front with books from publishers. They’re chopped up, reassembled and packaged, and finally made available for sale in digital form.

Most ebooks are created using a digital copy of the physical book, usually in PDF format. PDF files have a fixed layout, which means they’re formatted in the way they’re supposed to appear on a printed page. However, ebooks need to be reflowable, which means that if you change the font size on the ebook, the words and sentences and paragraphs should be reformatted so that the words wrap around properly in the paragraph. You can’t do this well with PDFs.

To make a PDF into a reflowable ebook, publishers usually use a conversion house. Such companies, in turn, use a combination of software and workers overseas. Many of the conversion houses use people in India or China, or sometimes more exotic places like Sierra Leone or Madagascar or the Philippines. They usually work in a large warehouse or an old factory, with cubicles running from one end of the factory to the other on multiple floors.

Elbow to elbow, the workers stare at words on the screen all day, reading ebooks. They remove page numbers, reformat the ebooks to make them reflowable, and skim through them afterward to make sure no paragraphs or illustrations from the originals were lost during the process.

But not all books are in PDF format; some only exist in print. More brutal methods are often needed to digitize such books. As part of my job, I got to watch as workers destroyed print books to turn them into ebooks. Pages had to be removed from books so they could be scanned and digitized. As a book lover, I was horrified. To remove the pages of the book, workers would hack the spines off with knives like they were whacking their way through the jungle with machetes. Once their content was scanned, those pages would be tossed into a Dumpster at the end of every shift.

It was destructive, and the books could never be recovered afterward. The ebook revolution was bloodless, in the sense that there were no human casualties. But if books could bleed, you’d find their graveyards overseas. You’d find burial pits, unmarked graves, and hundreds of thousands of casualties.

But all this was needed to launch the Kindle; we couldn’t just launch a hardware product without any ebooks to read. Without ebooks, the Fiona device would have been just an expensive paperweight.

You see, we needed both the ebooks and the hardware for the Kindle flywheel.

Many people in dot-com and tech companies think in terms of “flywheels,” but most nontechnical people don’t know what that means. It probably sounds like lots of flies strung up to a mill wheel, slowly turning it to crush wheat into flour.

In tech terms, a flywheel is something that builds up energy as it spins. The goal is to get it spinning faster and faster, however you can. The faster it spins, the more energy you have (or in business terms, the more money you have). The Kindle flywheel, for example, might start with launching an e-reader into the marketplace with a small number of ebooks. People buy the device, and then they use it to buy ebooks. The profit from both can be used to build an improved e-reader, which can be sold more cheaply, which then means more people will buy it and consequently buy more ebooks, the profits of which can then go back into building even better, even cheaper Kindles. With every push the flywheel gets, the faster it spins and the more powerful it becomes.

The Kindle flywheel started spinning fast as the Kindle business grew. And in true Amazon tradition, the business was run with metrics, with meetings called “deep dives” where the team would dive into spreadsheets. Amazon is a highly numerate culture. The numerically literate seemed to do well there, because they could mentally pivot rows and columns of spreadsheets and crunch numbers on the fly.

During a deep dive, you let go of preconceived notions and think logically. You look at data—instead of doing a technical hand-wave, you speak to the specifics. In Amazon’s deep-dive culture, facts are preferred to opinions. Deep dives are like science experiments, and you approach them with a hypothesis you want to prove. If your hypothesis is disproven, then you come up with a new hypothesis, run tests to gather data, and analyze data to prove or disprove the new hypothesis.

Most of the engineers at Amazon dreaded these deep dives because they had to put on something formal, like a button-up shirt and a pair of jeans with a belt. Amazon isn’t a formal place: a J. Crew shirt and Dockers are as formal as it gets. But still, for engineers, even wearing these is an affront against nature, a blasphemous abomination out of a Dungeons & Dragons game or an accursed H. P. Lovecraft story.

In one of my first meetings with Jeff Bezos, we were doing a deep dive on ebook content and what it looked like on the Kindle. We sat and used our Kindles as customers might. In some ways this was like the first digital book club; we were mostly silent, just reading on our Kindles. Sometimes we would annotate content or buy a new book—anything to test all the features.

At one point, Jeff’s Kindle must have crashed, because it became unresponsive. The room had been silent for a while because we were all absorbed in our books. Then out of nowhere, Jeff exclaimed: “I’m hung! I’m hung!” I looked up with a surprised grin on my face, but Jeff was unaware of his double entendre.

All the others in the room were actively trying to stifle their laughs. There was a little bit of hero worship at Amazon. Now, I admire anyone who runs a bookstore, so I can’t help but admire Jeff Bezos. Not only does he run the world’s biggest bookstore, but heck, he has his own rocketship company too. But some of my colleagues took admiration to a whole new level.

I don’t think anyone at Amazon deliberately shaved their heads bald to look like him, but people would be in a Jeff meeting and come out afterward and rave about Jeff’s stories, how he laughed, or a savage insight he had. People would find out about the books he was reading and read them too. (During the Kindle years, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable was popular among the Jeffnosanti, although a book he read on the history of tungsten was slightly less popular.) People routinely lionized Jeff for how much money he had and his high IQ. So they certainly did not want to look like they were laughing at him or criticizing his ideas.

Let’s face it: we all contributed to Kindle, but Jeff was the visionary, and digital books will be his legacy. True, there were other digital book pioneers. Heck, I was one of them. I made the first modern ebook in 1999, and I invented my fair share of Kindle features. And I wasn’t alone; we all invented Kindle in our own ways. None of us who toiled in the Kindle workshops were flunkies. We were all colorful characters, innovators, and pioneers.

But only Jeff had the vision and the millions of dollars in seed capital to start Kindle. And trust me, it took a lot of capital, considering the salaries and stock grants for the employees the first few years, as well as all the R&D and acquisitions and startups he had to fund. Jeff not only saw the dream; he also made sure the dream happened, at great financial risk.

So as difficult as our challenges could be, life at Amazon felt like we were creating something revolutionary, and we had the financial means to do it. We were like techie versions of the early workers who toiled in Gutenberg’s workshop.

Life in the Kindle offices in those early days was like working in an alternate, over-caffeinated, sugar-high universe. And I loved it. The offices were loud, with the sounds of BlackBerries and pagers going off. The building shook every ten minutes as a streetcar rumbled past, and the hum of a microwave melting someone’s leftover Indian dinner filled the air at lunchtime. Inevitably the cries of an engineer shouting at the top of his lungs would emerge from a conference room, along with the pounding of his fists against the whiteboard walls.

In the kitchen you would find occasional stacks of Top Pot donuts, local Seattle fritters that tasted like they’d been deep-fried in nothing but pure sugar, cocaine, and aspirin. You’d also find the remains of catered breakfasts or lunches that senior management would put out in a kitchen for anyone else to have when they were done eating, like lords of the manor throwing their serfs an occasional bone to nibble on.

Like most technology companies, Kindle had lots of beer, usually on Friday afternoons. People would often bring in six-packs, open them near someone’s desk, and stand around and talk at the end of a long day. Some crazy conversation would emerge, full of crazy, hypothetical what-ifs like: “If you could suspend a killer whale from a rope and suspend a tiger from a rope and let them attack each other, who would win?”

“Decoration” was hardly the word for what you’d see in the warren of cubicles we inhabited. If you walked among them, you would find Amazon-issued Magic 8 Balls, humming computers, Kindles connected to power cables, teetering printouts of architecture diagrams or spreadsheets, posters from Battlestar Galactica on how to spot Cylons, tipsy engineers still arguing about whether the killer whale would get the tiger, discarded Kindle boxes being used to prop up Foosball tables, and an arcade-style, fully functioning Donkey Kong game I could never beat.

Amazon was, in short, a bit of a sloppy Seattle dot-com—but one with billion-dollar revenues and razor-thin profit margins. Those thin margins meant that we had to stay focused on launching Kindle, without distraction.

Secrecy was important in the early days of Kindle. We weren’t allowed to take our Kindles home or show them to our families or get caught using them in public, out of fear that someone outside of Amazon would see the Kindle and leak information to blogs or newspapers.

But with this secrecy came a great feeling of pride and privilege. I felt like one of the first people to use an iPod, years before anyone else even knew it existed. The Kindle was a secret I couldn’t share with anyone, not even my family!

Until the Kindle launched, the only other place on the planet that knew about it was Lab126 in Cupertino, California, where the Kindle hardware was designed.

In the very early days of Kindle, when its eInk screen was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye, Amazon was smart enough to realize it had never done manufacturing before. It was great at website sales, but it had no expertise in making hardware. Jeff decided it would be best to spin up a new organization solely responsible for this.

The name Lab126 came from a technical kind of pun. Amazon already had its “A to Z” development center in Palo Alto, which developed technologies like the A9 search engine that Amazon uses. Jeff wanted Lab126 to be a research facility—hence the “Lab” part of its name.

As for the “126” part, well, you have to realize that there was never a Lab125 or a Lab124, just like there was only ever a Preparation H, never a G or an F. The “126” part stems from the fact that “A” is the first letter of the alphabet and “Z” is the 26th, a techno-geeky homage to the “A to Z” development center. Jeff liked his geeky in-jokes—you could have heard his laugh a mile away when they came up with that name.

To attract and retain the best hardware engineers, Lab126 would be located not in Seattle but in Silicon Valley. The Lab126 offices were originally in a mini-mall across the street from a music studio and a slightly sleazy jewelry store. But due to the number of new hires, the lab quickly grew out of its old space and moved to Cupertino, right in the heart of the Valley. Moving to Cupertino put them in the big leagues—they were now in the same city as Apple.

After a year running Kindle’s ebook software team, I was asked to take the lead in launching Kindle as its program manager. That meant I had to know everything about the Kindle hardware, so I started flying down to Lab126 on a regular basis. I went to bridge the gaping cultural chasm between Amazon and Lab126. Everyone in Cupertino understood hardware, and everyone in Seattle understood the web, but neither understood the other. Amazon understood web services; Cupertino understood consumer electronics.

And the combination of the two: ebooks? It was new territory for everyone. Almost no one in the company had exactly the right set of qualifications to help Lab126 and Amazon speak to and understand each other, with one exception: me. I used to work at Motorola making cell phones and internet routers, so I could speak the language of hardware people, but I had also built websites for companies like Home Depot and Walmart, so I could speak the language used at Amazon.

On visiting Lab126 for the first time, what you’d notice would be the stark contrast in floor layout between Amazon’s offices and Lab126’s. Amazon has a messy organic layout. All the floors are open, with people at desks sitting side by side in a vast room without walls, like a Southeast Asian call center or some fly-by-night dot-com’s tech support division. The Lab126 offices resemble a printed circuit board, in keeping perhaps with the mentality of a hardware engineering company. All the cubicles and hallways are aligned at right angles, with efficient pathways in between. Being at Lab126 was like being on the circuit board inside a Kindle.

Much as I wanted to read on my Kindle while flying on a plane every week between Lab126 and Amazon, I couldn’t because Kindle was still such a secret. I couldn’t even bring the Kindle through airport security, in case the security personnel needed to examine it. Plus, I feared that journalists or competitors might see my Kindle in the few seconds that it would be in plain view.

I spent two years traveling back and forth between Lab126 and Amazon. When you’re a kid, the years have a way of passing quickly. All you can seem to remember when you look back are summer nights, fireflies, and snowball fights. The same was true of me with Kindle. When I look back at the years leading up to the Kindle launch, it’s like I was a kid, moving happily from one day to the next, one challenge to the next.

One of the challenges required Jeff’s personal attention and had to do with the Kindle ebook format. Nobody else on the Kindle team believed it was important enough to merit his attention, but I did, so I set up a meeting with Jeff to discuss it. (I suspect that the days when someone can set up a meeting willy-nilly with Jeff are over, now that Kindle has grown so large.)

Now, just because you had set up a meeting with Jeff didn’t mean it would actually take place. To get to Jeff’s office, you had to get past his executive assistants. They have offices of their own, and in a Kafkaesque way, you’d have to talk your way past the first executive assistant to see the next one and then talk your way past her to make your way to the third assistant, and so on. Eventually you got to Jeff’s office, where you’d probably find him gone and realize that they’d neglected to say he was out for the day.

The day of the meeting, I made it to Jeff’s office a little early, before he had arrived from another meeting elsewhere. I looked through his windows and tried to understand the way he saw things. He had a telescope in his office and pictures of his kids on the wall. It was a small office, actually, dominated by a giant work desk with tidy stacks of papers.

I imagined him looking out through his telescope at his far-flung workers, spread out as they were through Seattle in different office buildings, and I imagined him perhaps aiming his telescope at his fulfillment centers in Kentucky or Nevada, yearning to see the incessant shipments of everything from books to Beanie Babies, DVDs to diapers.

Protected by his executive assistants and sequestered in a tower in Amazon’s headquarters, Jeff’s office was a little like a walled garden. It’s an appropriate metaphor, because what Jeff and I discussed that day, and on days and weeks to follow, had to do with Kindle’s own walled garden.

When you’re reading about companies like Amazon and Apple, you often come across the “walled garden” metaphor. I want to explain it to you with a visual metaphor, because I’m a visual guy.

Imagine the wall of a medieval fortress. There might even be a moat around it. It’s a tall wall, made of stone—a wall to keep the enemy out. There’s one way into and out of the fortress, and that’s over a drawbridge that comes clanking down to let you across the moat, through a hole in the wall, and into the city inside. You can think of the city as being everything good that the wall is supposed to be protecting—all the people and gardens inside. This wall protects you from the dragons outside, from the Vandals and Huns and would-be conquerors.

In tech terms, the walled garden is the arrangement of software and hardware and file format that makes it almost impossible to get to what’s inside unless you go over the drawbridge, the officially sanctioned way in.

Look at the iPod. It relies on a proprietary format, a proprietary way of getting content into and out of the device. And yet it’s successful because the walled garden is tended so carefully.

Amazon has a similar walled garden for the Kindle. The only way you can buy a book and read it on the Kindle, according to Amazon’s walled garden approach, is to buy the book from the Kindle store. Are there other ways of reading a book on a Kindle? Yes, but they’re equivalent to the Vandals and Huns laying siege to the city by running ladders up its ramparts and then climbing those ladders with axes and grappling irons. In modern tech terms, this kind of attack is piracy. Or if not outright piracy, it’s that gray area related to digital rights management (called DRM)—the restrictions used to keep people from copying or sharing ebooks for free.

DRM works against most would-be pirates because it’s often too difficult and exasperating to break. Difficult, but never impossible. It’s a game of cat and mouse, and there’s always a genius who outsmarts the current DRM that’s out on the market. And then the software people at Amazon and Apple and elsewhere respond with patches and updates to make their walls more secure. Apple, for example, releases about ten updates a year to its iTunes software, and most of them include anti-piracy measures.

As ethical readers, you and I don’t need to worry much about what DRM means, and it’s not likely to affect us. But because occasional readers do try to pirate ebooks, we’re all penalized by the increased cost of ebooks and the inconvenience in copying them to other devices. That process should be easy, but often it’s painstaking. I think everyone agrees that it’s sad that we have to live in a world with DRM, but it’s a consequence of the technical nature of ebooks.

Likewise, there’s another technicality with ebooks called “file format” that we don’t have to worry about with printed books. There’s only one format for a printed book, and that’s paper. You can pick up any printed book and read it, as long as you know the language. The format of the book is no barrier to reading.

But imagine having to wear special glasses to read books by different publishers. Imagine you needed one pair of glasses to read Random House books and another to read Simon & Schuster books. Each pair of glasses would be sensitive to the invisible inks each publisher used. Well, that’s what it’s like with ebooks now.

Amazon has its own ebook format, and Adobe makes another ebook format called ePub. There are many formats on the market. If you live in Japan and want to read ebooks, for example, you have two incompatible ebook formats to choose from.

Formats make things difficult. There’s no way I can take a book I bought for my Kindle and copy it onto a Sony device—not unless I use some technical wizardry, some illegal tools that can be downloaded from the shady side of the internet. And most consumers aren’t going to learn how to use these obscure wizard’s tools. Like you, they’ll be confronted with a choice of e-readers, which locks you into the format of the books you’re able to read. And once you’re locked into the format, you’re locked into what kinds of books you can read. You may find that a book you want to read is only available for Kindle, but if you have another device, then you can’t purchase the book until it eventually becomes available on that device.

The Kindle has its own proprietary format. And it’s an old format, one that dates back to the 1990s and applications written for PDAs. Now, I worked at Amazon, and I know the Kindle format inside and out. I couldn’t have told Jeff this at the time—but as much as I hate to say this, I believe the Kindle file format was limited and made for poorer-quality ebooks.

Here’s how to think about ebook file formats: think about their fidelity to printed books. When we speak of music, we often speak in terms of lo-fi or hi-fi, that is, low or high fidelity. The same terms are appropriate for ebooks. Think of a print book as the gold standard for quality. A book in the Kindle format would be able to reproduce most of the text (though not all the accent marks and sometimes obscure symbols) and is often able to reproduce the margins or the page breaks in the print book.

I estimate the Kindle format to have achieved something like 50 percent fidelity compared to print. It’s on the lo-fi side. But I think formats that launched in the years after Kindle, such as the one being used in both the Nook and iPad, are more hi-fi, because they allow designers to do typographically compelling high-design flourishes, as well as embed fonts and complex equations into the ebook. These formats approach 90 percent of print fidelity.

I’m a book lover, and I cared a lot about improving the file format when I was on the Kindle team. But to Jeff and others, file format was just one of many issues that needed to be taken into consideration in launching Kindle. And besides, in the early days, most people on the Kindle team didn’t worry about these lo-fi and hi-fi details, because Kindle was targeted at readers buying genre fiction like romance books and sci-fi and bestsellers. Even in print, these kinds of books aren’t stylistically nuanced.

I dealt with crises of all stripes and sizes as we prepared to launch Kindle, but all the issues eventually got solved, one by one.

Before I knew it, there was just one day left before Kindle launched.

We don’t know what it was like for Gutenberg in the hours before he unveiled his Bible and the secrecy was finally lifted. Until then, was he furtive, fearful that any secret would be stolen and copied? We don’t know how he or his workers felt. Sure, we know that pies were introduced in the 1450s, and we can imagine Gutenberg going outside with his workers that day and serving them celebratory slices of quail pie and glasses of plum gin or something special from his larder.

Some of his workers were no doubt hungover from the night before, drunk in a corner and being licked by the dogs after celebrating their victory, but maybe others could see how important the printed book would be. Because truly, Gutenberg had launched something at once commonplace and innovative—a humble Bible, but one set in beautiful, printed type. He unwittingly launched the Protestant Reformation, as well as a shift in reading so profound that we’re feeling aftershocks of the original tremor even now, centuries later.

Five hundred years later, on the eve of the ebook revolution, I settled in for sleep the night before we launched the Kindle. But sleep was impossible; there was the nagging worry that I had surely forgotten someone or something important. I kept getting out of bed to check my email. I finally managed to get an hour’s rest before being awakened by a team in India looking for help with some last-minute problems.

After helping them, I stayed awake in bed with prelaunch insomnia, looking out through the window and thinking. Tomorrow, once Kindle was launched, things would never be the same again for anyone. Amazon had a lot of power, and ebooks would surely capture people’s imaginations.

I stayed awake through the early morning hours of November 19, 2007, wondering about the Kindle. What would ebooks mean for literacy, for reading, for the book itself? Would the Kindle hasten the decline of the book—a decline that had started with radio and movies and had accelerated with TV and video games and the internet—or would it instead revitalize books and breathe fresh life into them?

Such questions still keep me up at night. I have answers for some of my old questions, but now I struggle with new ones. On the morning of the Kindle launch, I looked through the bedroom window until I had to get dressed and go to work at 4:00 a.m. There was a rare break in the gloom-clouds over Seattle, and I could see a few stars, bright enough to be planets or maybe omens.

The next few hours saw me running the show in Seattle, while Jeff Bezos was on stage in New York announcing the Kindle. The launch was timed to the minute; I had a clipboard and a stopwatch. I was like the mission-controller in the movie version of Apollo 13, the one with the sweater around his shoulders who made sure each team was “go” for launch.

We didn’t want anyone saying, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” which is why the launch was scripted and tested in advance. The script was flawless. It was a dream launch. We got the store and services running at almost the exact moment when Jeff said, “Introducing Amazon Kindle,” in front of thousands of reporters and bloggers.

And then, Kindle was live.

Everyone in the Amazon offices in Seattle, sugar-addled since 4:00 a.m., started cheering.

We have the founders of Napster to thank for the widespread adoption of digital music, and we have Netflix to thank for the adoption of digital video. But the future owes digital books to Jeff Bezos.

Jeff is a simple man. His front teeth are a bit chipped from when he grinds them together, and as the years passed, he seemed to grow thinner, his snazzy blue suit slowly engulfing him. What hair Jeff had when I first met him gradually disappeared entirely. He has a great laugh, an infectious laugh. It makes you smile, as all great laughs do. As Jeff stood in New York about to announce the Kindle to the world, I could only imagine what he must have been feeling.

This was the moment Jeff had been waiting for since 2004. As he said in his press event that day, “We did a number of things that make the experience of discovering new reading material, getting that material into your hands, and reading seem like magic.”

And he was right: it really was like magic. As magical as books themselves.

The sorcerers behind the magic of products like the Kindle are the product managers. If you’re lucky as a product manager, you’ll have the time to dream up new ideas, but if not, you’ll be handed ideas from other executives and told to figure out how to make them happen. Some product managers are more expert than others, more visionary. At Amazon, for example, the CEO was the ultimate product manager.

And although such product managers are possessed of genius, there are two other secrets to their success. For one, they’re poised like spiders in the centers of their webs of information, and they feed on this network of information. They know more than anyone else in their web and can use this information to further their own projects. Secondly, they have the enlightened autonomy to pursue their goals—something that can’t be done in politics or academia. These are enlightened capitalists for whom even their boards of directors and shareholders will often look the other way, trusting in their long-range plans and their long-range genius.

Three years earlier, Jeff had embarked on the tough challenge of inventing a new kind of book, a new kind of reading experience. But now, as we launched our first product, not only could we all finally read in public with our Kindles, since it was no longer a secret, but we also could introduce others to the joys of ebooks. We could change the lives of our customers by making reading more immediate and more featureful. We could continue innovating, using the original Kindle as a launch platform. We could continue adding improvements to a fundamental human experience, one that hadn’t changed in more than five hundred years. We were giving customers something they never asked for and delighting them with something at once strange, magical, and uplifting.

As for me, I could finally call my family and tell them what I was working on. For the last few years, I couldn’t say because Kindle was confidential, so my parents thought I was working for the FBI! I was excited and humbled. I rode the bus home and proudly read my Kindle and showed it off to everyone—although I was so exhausted that I don’t think I was able to read more than a page. I was temporarily relieved, but I knew that there’d be even harder work in the months and years ahead—not just for me or for Amazon, but for the billion-dollar book industry.

Bookmark: Knapsacks, Book Bags, and Baggage

Our Stone Age ancestors developed an innovation that I doubt few of us today could replicate, alone in the wilderness: the simple pot.

Whether it held water, seeds, or honey, I think the pot was the single greatest invention of the Stone Age. Before its invention, people most likely had to live closer to rivers or try to carry water with their hands, a futile task. Containers like the humble pot allowed people to spread geographically, to move and transfer goods and objects easily, and to improve the quality of their lives in a game-changing way. I think the ability to conceptualize and enclose volume in a man-made artifact is one of the keys to civilization.

The high-tech equivalent of the humble pot is the information cloud.

We don’t know where the cloud is taking us as a society. It’s something like a magic carpet, and we’re aloft on it, flying above everything, uncertain of our destination. The cloud is in essence a container for digital goods, and it’s already revolutionized the way we store those goods. It’s a clever way of enclosing yet more content in a much smaller area. The cloud is a giant pot with near-infinite volume and near-zero size. I’ll expand on this subject in the chapter “Our Books Are Moving to the Cloud,” but for now, I’ll note that because of the cloud, we no longer have to haul ebooks or information with us as we travel.

That makes satchels, book bags, and hand baggage increasingly useless as we adopt ebooks.

As a kid, I would manhandle an enormous book bag in school every day. I never had time to run back to my locker and replace books between classes, so I carried my full day’s allotment of books with me to all the classes I attended. After four years of this in junior high and another four years in high school, my shoulders were unusually well developed for a skinny, nerdy guy. But it was frustrating, tiresome work. I needed to buy a new book bag every few months. And every year, we would be inspected for scoliosis in gym class, no doubt partly because of all the books we had to haul, crushing our spines into sad, deformed springs.

Luckily for kids and their back doctors, this is no longer necessary.

And on adopting digital books, you no longer need to haul boxes of books with you every time you move to a different home. Gone are the days of duct-taping shoddy cardboard boxes from U-Haul or liquor stores and still watching your books explode onto the sidewalk when movers accidentally drop the over-heavy boxes. As the heir to the Stone Age pot, the cloud makes moving easier for those of us with large holdings of books.

A digital book weighs less than the whisker of a fly. So there’s no strain with the digital. You don’t have to haul digital books in cardboard boxes or book bags, so digital books are easy on the shoulders, and on the eye. But clearly, I’m a believer in the digital. Are there drawbacks to ebooks, in this sense? Absolutely. The sheer massiveness and weight of books adds a kind of gravitas to a home. Books in a home say that someone literate lives there, someone with specific sensibilities and tastes. A home with fully digitized music and ebooks and other media seems barren to me, like a minimalist Bauhaus detention cell, someplace unfit for friends and family. But that’s me. What do you think of books as decorations or as hefty physical objects to be lugged about?