Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (13 page)
Read Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading Online
Authors: Jason Merkoski
I was a bookish kid. I’d blow my weekly allowance at a bookstore at the local mall every Saturday. That’s when the mall’s courts and hallways were occupied by people selling secondhand books. They’d set up shop in front of the comic store and the Orange Julius store, not far from the Spaceport Arcade, where you could always hear the eight-bit battle cries of Donkey Kong. Because the books were used, they were often cheap. Hours after entering the mall, I’d emerge into daylight again with a stuffed knapsack, sometimes too heavy for me to carry on my back. I’d drag it along the sidewalk to my mom’s car like a refugee fleeing a burning library, ash and sparks in the wind behind me, determined to save as much culture as I could.
Among all these books, I’d often find inscriptions on the first or second page to boys and girls I’d never met from aunts and uncles of all stripes and sizes. The inscriptions were often inked—sometimes with a bold hand, sometimes a frail one—and were usually to commemorate an event. A birthday, an anniversary, or (more darkly) a divorce or bereavement.
Inscriptions are a more personal, lasting kind of autograph. When an author autographs your book, he’s often sitting at a table at a book-signing event, working in a rote, mechanical way and hoping to sell enough books by the end of the day to justify his time. It’s vaguely mercantile. But inscriptions are the life-soul of families and can often last longer than the families themselves.
For example, there’s a collection of inscribed Bibles at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Stuck in Dallas for a day due to a long layover, I chanced a trip to SMU and was lucky to peruse its carefully preserved Bibles and see the aging ink in them. Some of these Bibles date back to the 1700s and served in their time as birth records. Frontier families in Texas recorded the names and birth dates of their children, generation after generation. The Bibles give a sense of frontier life, of families living far from hospitals and churches, far from the society of anything but cattle and wolves and the hope for a better life in days to come.
Humble inscriptions are important parts of family history. And yet, if and when my own descendants try to reconstruct their family tree, they’ll be stumped by digital books. Because you see, digital books can’t have inscriptions. I can’t give my girlfriend a digital book and write a note on the front page. Digital books are an extinction event for inscriptions. It’s like what happened with the dinosaurs. Though they ruled the world, once the extinction event happened 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs died off, and there were no more dinosaur bones in the fossil record. Thus it is with digital books. In the digital fossil record, there won’t be any more traces of inscriptions.
It’s almost impossible to trace the life history of a digital good. If you download music illegally from the internet, you have no way of knowing who else owned the music file. It could have changed hands a thousand times, ricocheting from Russia to Serbia to France to the United States, from PC to Mac, from one BitTorrent client to another. Despite its travel, the file is still pristine, original, and untrammeled.
Imagine what a digital passport would look like if it could accompany such a file, stamped and counter-stamped with so many international visas! Unless you crack the file open and re-author it, you can’t put your mark on a digital good. Could you modify an ebook and inscribe it? Yes. Assuming you can crack the ebook open, you can use any number of tools to add a page to an ebook, but doing so is a hurdle. Actually, it’s more like trying to jump over a hurdle while racing uphill in a clown suit and scuba flippers. It’s so hard as to make the effort pointless.
I think we’ve lost something with ebooks in not being able to inscribe them or trace their histories. We’ve lost a way of learning about ourselves and our families. But then, perhaps this loss is compensated for by the rise in social networks, where one day your great-grandkids will be able to download all your tweets and Facebook posts.
Will there be tools to allow you to inscribe ebooks one day? If so, they’ll need to be provided by the retailers and others who control the reading experience of books, and that means Apple, Amazon, and others. You’ll need to rely on these retailers staying in business so that the inscriptions you author stay in their clouds. Once these clouds collapse, the inscriptions will likely be lost forever, unless a company one day provides the service of printing ebooks onto paper and binding them as regular old books.
I can imagine a retro company in Portland or Brooklyn doing this, a company run by hipsters in prim mustaches and fedoras, a boutique company that prints ebooks onto paper in the same way that other Brooklyn boutiques publish print magazines as clay tablets.
Each family has its own story, often partly inscribed in the pages of its books. Does your family have a book with an important inscription? A family Bible? Is a chapter of your own history preserved between the brittle pages of an old book? Care to share your story?
The biggest revolutionaries in the ebook revolution aren’t the retailers or authors—or even the publishers. They’re the readers, the ones who took a leap of faith and bought the first Kindles or who plunked down six hundred dollars on the first iPads. They’re the innovators and early adopters who told their friends and families how good ebooks were, how readable they were, and who bought up ebooks like crazy.
You have to ask yourself, of course, why people bought ebooks in the first place. To be fair, e-readers are sexy, and they’re great gadgets. And when innovators get their hands on a great new gadget, there’s often a lot of cachet that goes with it, which others adopt. You see the same thing all the time in fashion design and technology—this trickle-down effect of social mores and conventions, fads, trends, and gadgets. But one thing that is different about ebooks is what I call “reader’s guilt.”
While MP3 players and airplane-friendly DVD players are neat, most of the music or videos we consume are for entertainment purposes. But books are different. You spent years with them in school. You’ve likely been taught how important they are, and you suspect in a kind of hangdog, guilty way that you should be reading more often than you really do. That’s reader’s guilt. And that’s partly why some users—maybe even you—voraciously buy ebooks. You feel like you ought to. This nagging, guilty feeling may encourage you to give in and buy a Nook.
And let’s face it, we have every right to feel guilty for not reading as much as we ought to. According to studies funded by the National Education Association and publisher advocacy groups, the U.S. population is fragmented into two equal groups: half the population reads, and the rest don’t read. We’re a nation of readers and nonreaders. According to these studies, 33 percent of high school graduates who don’t go on to college never read another book for the rest of their lives, and 42 percent of college graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Sadly, 80 percent of U.S. families didn’t buy or read any books last year.
These numbers scare publishers, of course.
When it comes to ebooks, there are two kinds of publishers: innovators and laggards. During my time as Kindle’s technology evangelist, I met plenty of both.
In my travels, I found that, in general, the most innovative, flexible, and successful publishers in the book market were the small and midsized ones. They’re the ones that have the most to gain, the ones that are willing to take the largest risks. But they’re not so small that taking a risk with technology will bankrupt them. I’m thinking in particular about my own publisher, Sourcebooks, a company I first visited years ago when I was managing Amazon’s audio and video ebooks.
Sourcebooks was the first publisher to include CDs and DVDs with their print books, bundled as companions to the content. The idea that you could read the poetry of Sylvia Plath or T.S. Eliot and also hear them reciting their own poetry caused a stir when it was first launched ten years ago. Not only was Sourcebooks first to combine text and audio in print, but they also were the first to make the same move with ebooks. I remember working with them to get recordings of poetry slams digitized or videos by Johnny Cash that could be embedded and then seen in an ebook as it was read.
Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah runs the company with as much attention to detail as Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. And yet, unlike them, she’s nimble enough to adapt quickly and seek inspiration where she least expects it. She’s brazen and no-nonsense, the kind of person who’d run a saloon in the Wild West gold rush of ebooks. (Full disclosure: because of their talent for innovation, Sourcebooks was the first publisher that came to mind when it came time for me to pitch this book.)
Based outside Chicago, Sourcebooks has three or four hands in different technology pies, building out enhanced ebooks that seamlessly integrate video and audio with reading and dazzling storytelling, as well as interactive children’s books that personalize the reading experience for each child.
Bill, another innovative publisher I know, runs a company that makes travel guides. He totally gets the future of books, even though he seems like a classic old-school publisher. He enunciates clearly, thinks through every word and nuance, and speaks as if he learned rhetoric in college, clearly a dying art. I could sit for hours listening to him in his conference room, which is lined with travel guides to places as remote as Baja and Bali.
I’m not sure what’s more exotic, all those travel guides and the worlds they represent, or this voice of grandeur from publishing’s past, when publishers were not only eloquent but understood their financial models and kept up to date with technology. That’s dizzyingly difficult and complex for most publishers today, considering how overwhelmed they are by all the new pricing models and gadgetry available.
When I talk to Bill about the travel guides of the future and how reading will change, we agree that there will be guidebooks that blur the lines between reading about a place and experiencing it more tangibly, even from another location.
Publishers like Dominique and Bill are looking at creating ebooks that are more like digital applications, because those ebooks can do more than traditional books or even regular ebooks. They see ebooks as interactive and engaging products, with enough narrative or nonfictional glue to bind everything together.
These kinds of ebooks are expensive to make, so you’re not likely to see a lot of them, at least initially. Ebooks as applications are sexy, but like the sexiest of creatures, their beauty soon fades. What looks really hot now with all of its techno-trickery will, of necessity, become obsolete in a few years. That’s the way of applications. I challenge you to find a computer that will load and run software you bought ten or twenty years ago. Even if you could find the software in CD or downloadable form, the computer’s hardware and operating systems will have changed so much in the intervening years that you’d be hard-pressed to get the application running.
This fast pace of innovation is a problem with technology in general. For example, I found a digital tape of some of the earliest writing I did as a kid, from when I’d visit my father’s newspaper and write stories on the newspaper mainframe. These stories were backed up onto tape spools, which I have now. But I’ve searched far and wide, and the only place I can find that has a working reader for this kind of tape is a computer museum in Germany for technology that was still working twenty years ago.
Technology ages. Fast.
The shelf life of an ebook application is only a few years at best. And an Android ebook app has a different kind of code than an Apple ebook app. They’re written in different languages, and you have to pay engineers tens of thousands of dollars to port them from one platform to another. Today’s hot application becomes yesterday’s fossil in the blink of an eye.
Take a look at the fossils in the Burgess Shale Formation, a strip of ancient rock in the Canadian Rockies. These are fossils of creatures that lived 500 million years ago and can’t be found anymore on our planet. Some look like winged lobsters or walking accordions with poisonous spines, like manta rays with parrot’s beaks or five-eyed worms the size of elephant snouts. They’re creatures with body plans so bizarre and befuddling that we’d be terrified if we saw any of them crawling along the sidewalk. But it’s through these bizarre bursts of evolution that nature experiments and selects which creatures will survive and move into another era.
Even so, I’m not faulting publishers in these halcyon, gold-rush days of ebooks for innovating and plunking down $50,000 or more to build each interactive ebook application (and that’s what they often cost). They’re expensive, and everyone from publisher to author tightens their belts on royalties to make these applications happen. But even if publishers don’t see immediate profit from ebook apps, the experiences they gain are essential for evolving into the future. In times like this, when the pace of evolution is fast enough to be called a revolution, there are massive changes and die-offs, and the nimble will inherit the earth. The survivors will be those who are agile enough to scamper between the legs of the bigger dinosaurs, avoiding them as they fall.
I’ve spoken of innovators, but the publishing world has plenty of laggards, as well, including some of the biggest names in the game. While they were once the industry darlings, many of the bigger, more established New York publishers are now the dinosaurs.
Walking into the New York offices of a Big Five publisher is like stepping back in time. Or like stepping onto the set of
Mad
Men
. Even when you’re out for lunch with the presidents and general managers, you’re often in a vermouth-fogged version of the 1950s and ’60s, where deals are decided over lunch or sometimes by the quality of your suit tie or class ring.
Success slows some publishers down, making it hard for them to take risks. And just as Amazon is wary of innovating too fast or leaking its secrets, top New York publishers likewise can be very cagey and secretive. I know of one publisher, for example, who paid for a vice president to rent an apartment for a month and lock herself in there, in total secret, with the manuscript of a forthcoming blockbuster book. The vice president had a month to format the manuscript as an ebook by hand. The publisher didn’t want to risk giving outside conversion houses the digital manuscript, for fear it might leak.
But all the secrets come out once a year when all the retailers and publishers gather at a trade show called BookExpo America.
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April showers bring May flowers, along with rants from publishers at BookExpo America in New York, the nation’s largest book event. I’d fly there every May to represent Amazon in talking to publishers about ebooks and innovation. My meetings with publishers outside Amazon’s walled garden weren’t all pleasant exchanges of ideas and innovation, though. In fact, more often than not, I’d find myself getting yelled at and treated like I was an invading Vandal or Hun.
On one particular day, for example, I was in a basement somewhere in New York City, and a senior vice president of Disney books was screaming at me.
He was at one end of a conference-room table, and it felt like an interrogation. I usually associate Disney with talking animals and spinning teacups and walking brooms, but when you’re actually being yelled at by Disney, you see the dark side of the Magic Kingdom. But I don’t hold it against them. An hour earlier, I was in the same conference room, but that time, a vice president of HarperCollins was screaming at me. An hour later, another publisher would be yelling at me.
The screams got worse every year, louder and louder. Publishers love to hate Amazon. Even before Kindle, Amazon’s relationship with the publishing world was like that of an aging couple. They were forever arguing with one another, but still married after all these years.
It didn’t matter what we yelled about in any given year. The next year, it would be something different—but we’d always shake hands and smile when it was all done. The Amazon folks would move on to confrontations with the next publisher, and the vice president of Disney would go on to yell at Apple or Sony. It’s a dance we did every year underneath the trade show floor.
On the floor itself, you could get autographs from famous authors, pick up complimentary books or comics, hold the latest e-readers in your hands, and swap business cards with thousands of small publishers and independents on the book-publishing sidelines.
But two stories below the trade show floors—in underground conference rooms laid out like Cuban detention cells—the real wheeling and dealing happened. Everyone’s shirts were rumpled with sweat and exertion, and people were pounding their fists on tables. And yet, everyone smiled to themselves, because everyone was getting something from these negotiations.
The same unholy shrieking happens every year at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany—the screams are just more guttural. Even at the London Book Fair, now that ebooks have taken off, strained smiles break through the British reserve of once-formal publishers. That’s because serious amounts of money are involved every year at these negotiations, and that’s true all around the world.
Book readers are mostly oblivious to these backdoor, underground conversations, because the content keeps flowing, and the struggles behind the scenes are just part of business as usual. But they are struggles for everyone in publishing.
You see, most everyone in publishing came into it with an arts background, a degree in writing. These are people who have read Homer and Aeschylus, who can tell the difference between a simile and a metaphor. They can spot a good book when they see one. But nothing in college prepared them for these blood-elevating, stress-inducing fistfights with words.
They came to publishing because of their love of words and their love of language, because of that imaginative faculty we all possess that somehow switches on when we’re immersed in a book—when the real world peels away like an ugly scab and we’re left with fresh new skin underneath, entranced by this imaginative new world. Maybe that’s what kept us going through all those negotiations at trade shows like BookExpo America.
When it was all done, everyone would smile through thin lips and shake hands, and there’d be an invitation to a party at the Flatiron Building, where everyone would get drunk together with Whoopi Goldberg and Spiderman. All these publishing executives would party with actors and authors and swill manhattans as if Tuesday was the new Friday, but they’d come back to those underground conference rooms the next day, their hangovers pounding in their heads and their fists pounding on the conference-room tables. We reenacted this ritual every year out of misguided self-interest. But if we didn’t reenact this, books would have piled up at the publisher’s offices in Midtown Manhattan and you’d have had no way to buy your books.
Even though books are moving to digital, events like BookExpo America are as strong as ever. Likewise, the American Concrete Institute still meets once a year at its main trade show, even though concrete is as old as the Roman Empire. Whenever industries are held together by relationships, you’ll still find people meeting every year. So we won’t see trade shows like BookExpo America fade or move entirely to chat-room windows on computers just because books are going digital. And especially not now, while the ebook revolution is in full swing and the relationships of key players are shifting on a near-daily basis.