Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (11 page)

In cell phone novels, you receive text messages directly from the author. If you’ve got an unlimited text message plan on your phone, I totally encourage you to try one of these books—just search for “cell phone novel” on the web and look for a book that’s interesting! These books are written in a sparse, sublime style. They come at you like text messages from a friend. And yes, they have tension. Intrigue. And suspense. And in some of these, you can write back to the author to ask for clarification or a change in the plot.

For the first time, authors and readers are able to talk directly with one another. Reading has always been a solitary pursuit, and even book clubs have been small affairs. But now book discussions can cross nations’ lines. There’s no limit to how many readers can cram into a chat room or participate online with Facebook or Twitter. Now, at last, ebooks have ignited the conversation between authors and readers.

If that’s not engagement, what is?

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.