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

I’m wearing a white smock and white gloves, and the room is utterly silent. I’m guarded by two men, also in white smocks and gloves, who motion for me to sit down. They sit down beside me, one on either side of me. I can’t make a move without their permission, but I don’t want to make a move. This could be prison. But no, this is exactly where I want to be.

The room has the sparse concrete emptiness of a police interrogation chamber, but it’s merely austere. It’s got the feeling of a clean room where even a speck of dust or a fallen strand of hair is seen as a holy horror, but it’s not a laboratory at Lab126 or anywhere within the curving, clean white halls of Apple in Cupertino. No, this is the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I came here to see what our future will look like.

Here in the library, a massive digitization project has taken place. More than eight thousand original wax cylinders from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been digitized at this library. There are recordings here of Presidents William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt, original Sousa marches, and operatic arias sung by the Great Creatore. But the cylinders were made from wax and wood more than a hundred years ago. They’re fragile, and they’re falling apart fast.

A librarian brings me an original wax cylinder to look at. The cylinder is fitted onto a phonograph, and a scratchy voice comes out of the horn for me to hear. It warbles with static and rises and falls as the cylinder rotates. It’s almost like you’re listening to the ocean, although you can hear a man’s voice in the background, as if he’s drowning in the sea of history and shouting distantly for help and recognition.

There are strong parallels between the first e-readers and wax cylinders.

When they came out, wax cylinders were amazing. They were the iPods of the 1890s. They let you listen to music at any time of day, something previously unavailable to anyone (except perhaps those who were wealthy enough to have their own string band commissioned and ready to play at all hours in their mansions or palaces). And yet when we look back on wax cylinders today, they seem primitive.

In the same way, the amazing e-readers that launched the ebook revolution are just as primitive as wax cylinders. For example, when you listen to an old cylinder, you often hear an announcer describing the music that follows. The announcer is practically shouting at the top of his lungs to make himself heard. Recording technology was feeble in the 1890s, so you had to shout for your voice to be recorded. In a similar fashion, the first ebooks had no fonts and no bold or italic styles, and you had to WRITE IN UPPER CASE FOR EMPHASIS!

The original Kindle was bare bones, as well. It basically only displayed black and white text, in just one font and in just six point sizes. The original Sony e-reader was just as bereft from a typographic point of view, and if you were given a choice between a print book and an ebook printed out on paper, you’d be challenged to choose the latter with its monotonous layout and over-simple style. At best, the text could have three different styles—regular, bold, or italic. Pictures were a bit of a novelty, even for Sony.

This was originally true of print books as well, though. If you’re lucky enough to see one of Gutenberg’s Bibles in a museum, you’ll perhaps be especially impressed by the illustrations, by the flowing capital letters that start every paragraph, richly colored and unbelievably ornate. But they weren’t Gutenberg’s doing. His Bibles were actually bare-bones text. The illuminated letters, as well as the chapter headers, would have to be added afterward by hand in red ink by the patrons who bought the Bibles. They would hire artists to paint them in, the way we hire tattoo artists to illustrate our own bodies.

New technology always starts out prematurely, but the early adopters adapt it as best as they can and learn how to shout to overcome the technology’s shortcomings. And once the technology matures, the old products begin to fade into the past. Wax cylinders are now fragile and falling apart. Every year, hundreds of these recordings get too brittle to play anymore or succumb to “vinegar syndrome,” where they turn to liquid. Fewer than 5 percent of the wax cylinders made before 1900 survive.

In a hundred years, you might see print books about as often as you see wax cylinders now, which is to say, rarely. You’d be hard-pressed to find a wax cylinder now, even at an antique store. Print books will fade, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this. Likewise, though the horse and buggy was once the most popular form of mechanized transportation, buggies are now relegated to the lawns of old farms as decorations. And one day, if floating hover cars are ever invented, you’ll see Ford Mustangs and Toyota trucks abandoned outside those same farms to rust and weather. Technology has a way of shifting, and we’re an adaptable species. That’s our genius: we do adapt.

The visit to the wax-cylinder library is unsettling to me. Though we now manufacture millions of Kindles and iPads every year, how many of them will survive in a hundred years to play ebooks or MP3 files? I know of companies with vaults where they archive old MP3 players and e-readers. I’ve been to these vaults, had the glass display cases unlocked for me, and had the opportunity to hold some of the first 1990s MP3 players in my hands.

I’ve been to a private video-game museum in San Francisco and had the opportunity to play the original game of Pong and to play original Atari and Magnavox Odyssey console games. These aren’t antique salt shakers or silver spoons in your aunt’s curio cabinet. These are tech gadgets that are barely a decade or two old. And yet they’re already relics.

In the second Back to the Future movie, there’s a prescient glimpse at the display window of an antique store, which has an original Apple Macintosh for sale. For moviegoers in 1989, it would have been no more than a joke to see the hot tech gadget of the year as an antique, but there’s a bigger question here about durability.

You can still find old Linotype machines that were once used to set type for small-town newspapers, and even after a hundred years, they often work. They had no system software, no brittle silicon parts. Computers will fare less well over time. They rely on electromagnetic memory, which degrades over time, and on a limited number of spare parts available for repairs. For example, the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft of 1966 mapped the surface of the moon to help choose a landing site for the Apollo spacecraft, but once the mapping mission was done, the tape reels with their data were shelved.

Forty years later, scientists realized how useful this data might be for future moon missions, but they found it was nearly impossible to reconstruct the equipment needed to play back those tapes. After years of scavenging through NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab warehouses, they managed to find four rare tape players. Between all four players, they were able to salvage enough parts to get one halfway working. By contacting the retired presidents of former moon-mission subcontractors, they found additional parts and a small trove of repair manuals that one of them had in his garage.

What they lacked, though, was an understanding of the 1960s mindset—that is, how people in the era of the Lunar Orbiter thought. They lacked the implicit assumptions that 1960s engineers made and that were never recorded in the repair manuals, and they lacked knowledge of how information was coded and decoded onto those tapes. Information science had matured so much over forty years that it was nearly impossible to mentally travel back in time and think the way engineers did in a simpler time.

This particular story has a happy ending. They leased an abandoned McDonald’s, set up shop inside, and deciphered the old tape reels like modern-day cuneiform tablets. And we now have stunning digital images of the moon at an unprecedented level of detail—from tapes made in 1966.

The story is bleaker for software, though. At least with hardware, tape reels, and aging wax cylinders, you have something to inspect and work with. It’s a lot harder with bits.

A company in Watertown, Massachusetts, called Eastgate Systems seems to be the sole guardian of aging hypertexts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before the advent of the internet, these hypertexts were seen as the preeminent form of digital art. They combined text, image, and sound and often did it in a nonlinear way. Reading these hypertexts was a lot like life itself, in that once you made a choice, you were presented with more choices, and you could never go backward. It’s a technique that modern video games like Heavy Rain and Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors have rediscovered.

The pinnacle of such hypertexts was a massive project called Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, which had to be loaded from several floppy disks and which contained programming that actually—and deliberately—caused your computer to crash. It was designed to make you aware of the medium with which you were interacting. It would be like the equivalent of seeing this page turn to eInk phosphors and then disappear once you read it, or like having a book whose pages could only turn forward, because the past got destroyed with every page turn.

Sadly, while it’s possible to buy Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, it’s nearly impossible to read it. You would need an aging Mac computer from around 1990 and a defunct program called HyperCard. Maybe Eastgate Systems will revivify these early hypertexts, which have since been overshadowed by the internet, and make them available on iPads one day. Who knows? But the point is that software does not fare as well as hardware.

Media in our culture fares poorly in general, whether or not it’s digital.

Bookmark: Used Books

There’s an enormous market now for used books—a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly puts it in the billions of dollars. Because this market is so big, it allows us as readers to either buy used books ourselves or read used books that have been donated to libraries.

But there’s no such thing yet as a used ebook.

All purchases are individual, and DRM makes sure that a book that you purchased can only be read on your own device. Of course, there’s a dark undernet for pirated ebooks. As an experiment, I searched the peer-to-peer networks for The New York Times bestsellers available this week in ebook format, and I found pirated versions of all of them, contributed by anonymous and technically sophisticated book lovers. And don’t doubt that these folks love books, even though they’re pirates.

Still, though there’s no legally sanctioned and technologically functional used ebook market yet, it’s going to happen. I predict it will be started first by a company like Barnes & Noble that allows the resale of its ebooks through other websites—that is, third-party companies who will be able to sell ebooks to you at a discount perhaps, even though they buy the books directly from Barnes & Noble. There’s nothing strange about this reseller model. It’s used all the time for physical goods. I think the adoption of a reseller model for digital goods will open up a thriving used ebook market.

Perhaps a time period from the original date of a book’s publication will have to pass, maybe a year or two, after which the book will be available as a used ebook sale. At that point, the ebook would be available at a reduced price.

Or perhaps the laws of another country will allow used ebook sales, so you’ll end up going to an offshore website, like those that run legal online gambling sites, entities headquartered in Bermuda or Turks and Caicos. They’ll provide a marketplace for sellers and buyers, and these entities will take a small percent of each sale. They’ll be companies small enough to be run by one person, sitting in a beach chair in Bermuda and drinking a mai tai while his servers hum quietly in some nearby warehouse, raking in the cash and storing all the digital files.

I think it would be healthy if we could have a used ebook market. There are even hopeful signs that it may be starting soon; in 2013, Amazon applied for a patent on the sale of used digital goods, including ebooks. Used books—and by extension, used ebooks—would help readers, because more books could be bought at cheaper prices. This lets a reader get more bang from his or her buck. And it would help authors too, because being able to buy used ebooks means the author’s ideas and stories are kept in circulation longer. A book, once read, could be liberated from a Kindle or Nook and find another reader.

The drawback to used ebooks—and the reason why so many retailers and publishers are against them—is that they might encourage book piracy.

Piracy is possible for physical books, although to a much lesser extent. If a book is stolen from your house, it could be sold to a used bookstore, which in turn might resell it. But theft of physical books is rare, and it’s even rarer when a volume is resold and recognized—although that does happen. In 2010, experts at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, caught a thief who had stolen a first-edition Shakespeare volume from England ten years earlier. The thief had mutilated the book and ripped pages out, but it was still identifiable.

It’s much harder to catch a digital book thief. Ebooks lack sophisticated watermarks or other identifying mechanisms, so one digital book looks a lot like another. This means that there’s no real way to identify whether a used ebook was resold after being rightfully purchased or illegally copied one or more times.

In fact, because there’s no way to forensically differentiate a pirated ebook from a lawfully purchased one, the assumption is that any ebooks not sold by a major retailer must have been pirated. This taints the concept of used ebooks, which is unfortunate. At this point, used ebooks are presumed guilty of being pirated until proven innocent.

I, for one, think we need used ebooks—but what about you? Would you buy a used ebook? Trade one with a friend? Do you wish you could donate some of your own ebooks to a library? Or do you feel ebooks are already priced well and that selling them for less would hurt the livelihoods of authors and publishers alike?