Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (15 page)

I love my library.

It’s big enough that it spans the three floors of my house. It’s not the fanciest library; it doesn’t have recycled tropical hardwood shelves or ornate display cases. There’s no bemused librarian sitting there ready to help me find what I’m looking for. In fact, a small warehouse would be more useful and save me from traipsing upstairs and downstairs all the time.

This is why ebooks are so much easier for me. I can flick open my Kindle and search for a word and, within ten seconds, see the universe of content I have and all the books that mention the word I’m searching for. But this is just a scratch on the surface of what a universal digital library could be.

Google comes closest to my ideal for a universal library. With Google, you’ve got an ever-expanding library right at your fingertips. Moreover, you can upload a list of all your books to Google and recreate your own personal library in Google’s cloud.

Everyone in publishing and retail was looking forward with anticipation and anxiety to see what Google would finally do with its own ebook program when it launched in 2010. Would they introduce their own e-reader? Or a tablet? Or something completely new?

Surprisingly, yet staying true to its roots, Google chose to go with a browser-based solution. Google is just dipping its feet in the water, just testing ebooks out. Theirs is a long-range approach. And ultimately, it is well positioned to take on some of the more long-range reading features that are necessary for the evolution of the book, in what I call “Reading 2.0,” because Google stores its ebooks in that most ethereal and powerful of places: the cloud.

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While flying, I often read the in-flight magazine, which wants to sell me a robotic pooper-scooper, a talking garden gnome, a Wi-Fi-enabled pizza grill, New Age music for my cat, and a machine that will chew my food so I don’t have to. It’s like a
Lucky
magazine for the business-class traveler with time and money to waste. It will also sell me a CD shelf that can hold five hundred albums, even though the MP3 revolution is already ten years old and every album I own is digitized. Even my Baby Boomer parents have already converted their albums to MP3s!

Why would I buy such a ridiculous shelf and waste space for it somewhere in my house? It’s so 1980s, as useless now in the twenty-first century as mullets, Izod shirts, and boom boxes. The same magazine wants to sell me a recycled tropical hardwood bookshelf for my books. But why spend more money than you need to, especially now that our books soar in the clouds, as weightless as a thimbleful of electrons?

How big is an ebook? The question actually doesn’t make sense: a digital book is smaller than a fly, smaller than a microbe. It’s just an intermittent flicker of zeros and ones on a hard drive somewhere—on a cell phone, perhaps, or on a Kindle. And because a book is digital, you can make as many copies of it as you like, so you can easily back up your digital library in a few minutes.

But if I were to have a fire in my house and lose all of my printed books, I would have to buy them all over again, one at a time. That would be difficult, since some are pretty much irreplaceable at this point. My digital book library is different. I don’t have to worry about backing it up, because I know that Amazon or Apple or Barnes & Noble or any other digital bookseller will do it for me. They’re in the cloud.

Of course, I still back it up anyway, because I’m fundamentally paranoid about digital content, and you never know, Amazon or Apple or Barnes & Noble may one day go out of business. It’s happened before to companies large and small. The great East India Company, once one of the most powerful companies in the world, went defunct in 1874 after almost three hundred years in operation. If you take the long view of history, it’s statistically inevitable that Amazon and Apple and other ebook retailers will founder one day. Anyway, with the cheap price of hard drives these days, I can back up my digital library for less than ten dollars.

And if I forget for a week or a month to back up my ebooks, I can still rest easy knowing that they’re in the cloud.

There’s that word again:
cloud
. What’s a cloud? Where is it? Where are your ebooks, and how do you get them back if your device breaks?

I remember when I first discovered the cut-and-paste functions on a computer, when I was a child. All of a sudden, I learned that you could highlight text and cut it out, but it was still there somewhere. It was floating around in the ether, but in a way you couldn’t touch unless you knew the magic incantation, which was the paste command. It’s a magical concept, this invisible buffer that holds a couple of words or something as big as a whole story and lets you reposition it at will wherever you want.

The cloud, as we know it now, is the same concept but vastly, vastly bigger. And there’s not just one. Just like nature with its thunderclouds and puffy white clouds and tornados, Google and Amazon have their own kinds of clouds, and Apple and others do, as well.

Digital clouds are housed in rooms the size of football stadiums that are full of servers, racks of them from the height of your knees to your head, cabinets of computers with screaming fans strained to the breaking point. There are miles and miles of corridors of them in just one building, and often more corridors of them sprawling out into different buildings.

I’ve been to Amazon’s data centers, seen its cloud, walked down its aisles, and had my hair tossed around by the windstorm of exhaust from all these spinning fans. The whirr and hum of hard drives and fans keep the clouds alive. IBM’s cloud has servers so hot that they’re cooled by water pumped through pipes deep inside these computers to cool off all their cores.

Clouds are in these massive, windowless buildings, often built near rivers so they can be powered by hydroelectric dams. Whole rivers drain and flow to power these clouds. Clouds use more electricity per day than some developing nations in Africa do in more than a year.

These clouds are the warehouses of our digital content. Whether it’s Apple’s cloud in North Carolina or Amazon’s in Virginia, they’re always on, ready at the drop of a hat to send you content unimaginably fast. These clouds are connected by massive data pipes of fiber-optic cable to the outside world, to let requests for data in and to pump massive volumes of data out. They’re like rivers in their own rights, muddy torrents gushing MP3 files and ebooks.

Clouds are the new libraries. In a digital world, there’s no need to put content on shelves. When Amazon sells you an ebook, it’s not sitting on a shelf. Digital inventory is totally different from physical inventory. You either have an infinite amount of digital inventory, or you have none at all. As long as a company like Sony has the rights to sell an ebook, it never has to worry about running out of copies. The ebook is in their cloud forever, ready to sell fresh to new customers or to send down to a device if your copy of the book is accidentally deleted.

Our cloud-connected gizmos let us do this amazing dance with content. If your gizmo is about to die, you can always buy a new one and transfer content from the cloud into your new gadget. It’s sort of like in the movie
Being
John
Malkovich
, where people were able to live forever by moving into a new body. Any number of our gizmos can die, but as long as the cloud persists, our culture continues.

When I visited one of Google’s data centers, which holds their own ebook cloud, I was amazed. Even though I’d seen these types of buildings before, it was like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where the Lost Ark is packed into a crate and taken down distant corridors lined ceiling-high with such crates, a vast warehouse space. But instead of being deathly quiet, the Google data center was humming and throbbing with fast gigabit cables snaking everywhere, a hum of lights and circuitry.

The people who work inside these clouds wear pagers twenty-four hours a day. They get up in the middle of the night when their pager goes off to alert them of an outage or a hard drive that needs to be replaced or a network that needs to be restarted by kicking it a few times. These clouds of data are managed so tightly, with monitors and alarms that go off at the slightest hiccup, that they’re more reliable than almost anything else you can imagine. They’re definitely more reliable than your library or mine. We have a greater chance of having our houses burglarized and our books stolen than you have of worrying about whether a given cloud gets shut down.

Because of clouds, you can expect to get used to big, empty bookshelves inside people’s homes. Personal libraries will move to the web. True, you can put your personal library on any of today’s Kindles, but the more you put into your Kindle’s memory, the more you will find that searching is slowed down. So retailers will eventually move this search function to the web, where you’ll be able to look up words or phrases from any number of books that you have. Some of the more enlightened retailers will show you results for physical as well as digital books, perhaps depending on whether you bought the physical book from them or not.

And you can use the cloud to search inside your books, bringing Google search technology to bear on your own personal library. Assuming, of course, that a given book has already been digitized by Google. And over time, they all will be. Instead of walking your fingers down the spines of all your books to pick one to read, you’ll go to a single e-reader sitting on an otherwise empty bookshelf. With just a few taps of your finger against the touch screen, you’ll be able to find any of your books from your home or your office, or from the subway or a sunny hammock somewhere in Central America.

Lacking physical proximity to your content will no longer be a barrier to readability. This will be especially helpful if you’re a student or you’re researching something, looking for the one idea you need like a needle in a haystack of books.

All that remains is for some sort of bridge to be built between what you already own and what’s on the cloud, some way of proving to Google that you already own a physical version of a given book. I can imagine an innovator getting into this space and creating a service that lets you send receipts or photographs to Google for books you’ve already bought.

Once you show proof that you bought a given book, the book would be unlocked on the cloud and yours to read online, without you having to buy it yet again. Because that’s the thing: buying a new ebook is only half of what it will take to digitize our personal libraries. The other half is digitizing the existing analog content already in our possession. Whoever licks that problem will make it possible for us to finally become fully digital readers in our lifetime.

I think Google is incredibly intelligent and far-thinking, and eventually they’re going to own our personal libraries. They’ve been working for the last decade on digitizing content, trying to scan all the books from all the world’s libraries and place them in their cloud.

I’m personally a big advocate of literacy, and I’ve got a collector’s mentality. Although I know authors who are in an uproar about what Google is doing, I say, “Bring it on!”

When the Sony e-reader was first introduced, it was touted as being able to hold almost a hundred ebooks. The first Kindle could hold a thousand. Subsequent devices increased the amount of storage—but the cloud liberates us completely. I think the cloud is amazing, because it has the promise of storing all the books we’ve ever owned. Cloud-based companies like Google know this and are building out their clouds to store more and more. You can almost see the iron girders and mechanical struts in the sky, somehow lofting above it all.

This bountiful, ever-expanding cloud seems good, until you realize that it may come with a terrible price. It may mean that we no longer own our digital goods.

Ownership is already a difficult matter with digital possessions, because there’s nothing tangible. You can’t touch a bit or a byte. But you can at least store a digital copy of an ebook on a drive somewhere by backing it up. In fact, many people advocate doing such backups, even though Amazon and the others have secure copies of your content in their clouds. I think, however, that if publishers and retailers could get their way, you wouldn’t even have a digital file. Ebooks would simply be streamed, one page at a time, while you read. There would be no trace of them on your device afterward.

This, after all, is how TV shows have historically worked. You just watch what comes over the airwaves. This is also how Netflix works. And it’s how music services like Spotify and Pandora work. Even the Google Book product works this way. It simply isn’t an option to save a local copy of a song or movie. It’s in the cloud, and all you’re able to do is rent the content. The same may soon be true with ebooks. All you may own are the rights to read a book but not to own a copy of the actual content.

It’s a scary thought, with long-ranging implications—and in my opinion, few of them are for the best. We seem to be boomeranging back to the early days of broadcast media, to the time when radio and TV content were streamed over the airwaves and only rarely preserved on audiocassette or videotape.

With this in mind, I think that companies like Google are smart to focus on content first. You can have the best e-reader, but if your content selection is lackluster, you’re just going to be a flash in the digital pan. You can be the talk of the town at the Consumer Electronics Show, the yearly trade show for gadgeteers in Las Vegas, but content is a long-tail proposition, and the accumulation of selection takes time. I know this from leading an ebooks team at Amazon. I know how long it takes to digitize all these books.

Though Google got into the game late, you haven’t seen the last of them. Because although their strategy makes their results seem low key in the short-term, it positions them perfectly to drive and lead the next phase of reading, what I call Reading 2.0.