Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (19 page)

What will the future of education hold?

It’s more than simply taking old print metaphors and making them digital. The future of education isn’t about virtual blackboards or playing learning games as a kind of digital recess. I actually think we’re going to see more social elements in education. And let’s just accept the inevitable: social networks like Facebook and Twitter will be available for children at some point soon.

So why not, for example, encourage schools to post lesson plans and homework assignments to a child’s Facebook account? If children collaborate online about their homework assignment, so much the better. Most of what we do at work is collaborative. Why not encourage social education and make ebook widgets to enable this?

I recently got a chance to watch some college students studying for their finals. They came up with a new way of studying together by connecting over Skype and chat and sharing screenshots of the ebooks they were reading. What makes this interesting is that these weren’t students studying together in the same dorm room or library but around the globe—in Dubai, Singapore, London, and Seattle. They cobbled together this setup themselves, without any help or guidance from professors.

It’s important to worry about the future of education in a digital ebook-enabled world, especially if you have children, but I don’t think the future’s bleak. Instead, I think it’s full of possibility. When I put on my futurist’s hat, I see social connections everywhere inside ebooks. But even with all these social features, I think you’ll be able to curl up with a familiar book and turn off all the naysayers and chitchatters in the margins of your book. You will always be able to turn off the popular highlights. You will always be able to unplug from the network and enjoy a book like you always did before, in a golden hour of sunshine with a great read.

Take a walk, if you will, through a university library, through one of the areas where nobody ever goes, like the section on 1870s foreign literature. Northwestern University outside of Chicago has a great library, and if you peruse its desolate dusty sections, you’ll chance upon tomes from the era when books were bound with intricate marbled covers, a book-binding tradition that sadly is in decline. If you’re lucky enough to find such a marbled book, you’ll perhaps marvel at all its whorls and frothy bubbles, at all the inky emulsions! And the smells, the deliciously antique smell of old books, so musty, so brittle, so familiar but so sad.

A Kindle or iPad will never smell quite so lovely in its decline. If anything, it will smell of polyethylene and be frazzled like an overheated hair dryer. If it’s white, it will take on the vaguely urine-colored tint that all old plastic gets when it ages.

But no e-reader will last as long as any book you’ll find in a library. Kobos and Nooks and other devices will be relegated to sock drawers and trash bins, or lost in the garage sales and swap meets of techno-commodity fetishism. Devices like the Kindle have a lot of sales appeal, but only for a limited lifespan.

While the Kindle1 had such great demand in 2007 that it sold out in five hours and sold on eBay for 400 percent of the original price, it’s doubtful that you could sell a Kindle1 today. There’s always a later and greater device on the market. Companies who manufacture consumer products know this and design with this technical obsolescence in mind. As they’re manufacturing the device that will hit the shelves tomorrow, they’re already at work on its replacement.

While the reading hardware may age, the ebook content—being digital—is eternal. And likewise, because it’s digital, it’s possible to have a near-infinite number of copies of a given digital book. Perversely, though, your local library is only likely to have a handful of copies of a given digital book. Why is this?

Libraries have a fixed budget every year for what books they can purchase. So whether a given library wants to buy a print or a digital copy of a book, it’s still going to have to pay for that book. That means that if you’re late returning an ebook, you may still have to pay late fees (or, more humanely, the ebook will simply turn itself off and return to the library for another patron to use, even if you weren’t finished reading it). This is because only a fixed number of patrons at a time can borrow the ebook from a library.

So even though digital inventory is infinite—even though all the patrons of the library could, in theory, download the same copy of the ebook at the same time, licensing terms will prohibit that from happening. Yes, you’ll still have to reserve a digital ebook, just as you do a print book. The real benefit is that you’ll be able to check out and download your library ebooks from anywhere. You’re not going to need to go to a library to do that.

Libraries are always budget-constrained, and you’re going to start seeing less and less shelf space dedicated to print books, because they’re costly to maintain, rebind, stack, and insure. In an effort to save space and preserve shrinking resources, libraries will trend toward becoming miniature clouds of their own, collections of hard drives with all these ebooks on them. Perhaps the librarians themselves will become digital avatars of their former selves too, giving you online advice on which ebooks to read or which electronic encyclopedias and resources to use.

What will it mean as we lose this personal touch? Will we want to seek advice from an algorithm? Will we appreciate it if librarians are outsourced to a call center in the Philippines and there’s no personal touch? No. I think we’ll come to regret this loss. Whenever I visit my favorite library at the University of New Mexico, I find the librarians eager to help and anxious to please. I like the personal touch, the care they provide, and I believe we should work to embrace and preserve their crucial role as gatekeepers and conveyors of information.

I’m somewhat skeptical of the idea of digital librarians or digital libraries. Perhaps it’s because some of the best years of my life were spent in libraries, surrounded by books. I really do love print books. I spent a lot of my childhood at the county library every Saturday, and I learned more from the MIT library than I ever did from my professors. I was so open in my reading attitudes that I would devour everything. Fiction, math books, history—it was all tasty. To this day, I still spend hours walking through the racks of libraries, poking through their basement stacks, and looking for interesting or esoteric tomes. Libraries offer a sense of discovery like no other.

Still, I was thrilled when my local library finally figured out how to offer ebooks to patrons. That night, I maxed out my library card and downloaded twenty books. The selection might still be small—only a few tens of thousands of ebooks—but I found abundant reading material. I ordered a pizza, stayed in, and read all night long—sheer bliss! And I love the convenience of being able to beam the books directly to my Kindle, instead of lugging them back from my local branch in the back of my pickup truck.

For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you. Some books whisper, some shout, and some seem to speak for no reason whatsoever. But I’m sensitive to the way they all sound, all these voices that stay mute until you open the covers and start reading.

I’m glad to see libraries embracing the promise of digital books, even though such books mean a threat of sorts to their continued existence—at least, the existence that libraries currently imagine for themselves. Because the charter of libraries is changing. Digital content is causing libraries to change now, just as newspapers changed ten years ago. For newspapers to thrive now, they have to target their local audiences. The ads need to be local, and so do the stories. Local papers can’t maintain staff reporters to investigate events abroad anymore, and they don’t need to. They focus on what’s local.

Libraries can do the same. They can succeed by digitizing and making available local periodicals, historical archives, and books by regional authors. That’s how they can differentiate themselves and stay afloat. In contrast, there’s usually nothing local about a best-selling paperback. These more popular trade books are great candidates for being offered through a centralized, nationwide library service that local libraries can pay into.

As it stands now, individual libraries can sign up with a company called Overdrive to offer lendable ebooks—but many choose not to, for budget reasons. Having to provide print and digital books to patrons is a financial burden. I think the sooner we can accelerate the adoption of digital books, the better it will be for libraries and the more likely that some of the smaller libraries—often with great regional and local treasures—will survive into the decades ahead.

That said, I think there’s one little-considered adjunct to libraries that will likely fade with the widespread adoption of ebooks, and that’s the humble bookmobile.

On Main Street America, the bookmobile is as much a fixture as the ice cream truck, trundling down shady streets on summer afternoons, bringing library books to kids all over the country. In a digital age, it’s hard to imagine a future for the bookmobile, except perhaps as an avant-garde piece of installation art from the past. It’s not likely that the truck will drive down the streets letting the kids borrow digital books and download them onto their iPad minis, effectively zapping the children with ebooks.

In spite of the bookmobile’s demise, libraries as a whole have a great future. I elaborate in the next “bookmark” about bookworms and how libraries are likely to become instrumental as cultural safeguards of books, as a check against rampant retailer sales practices and possible censorship. There’s no better time than now to dust off your library card and check out some great ebooks to read on your iPad or Nook. You do have a library card, don’t you? I’ve been using mine so much recently that I’ve memorized the twenty-digit bar code.

And I’ve fallen so much in love with my local library that I might just hug the librarian the next time I stop by.

For now, books can be preserved forever in digital form, like pressed violets between pages of an ebook in the cloud. As long as our ebooks can keep pace with changing file formats and are duplicated enough to avoid loss through hard-drive crashes, their future is assured.

The ebook revolution allows us, once and for all, to know ourselves. As a culture, we no longer need to fear death. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence will live on in digital form, even if the aging originals in Washington, DC, turn too brittle to read. We no longer need to fear culture loss—assuming, of course, that there’s no futuristic form of library burning through selective viruses that attack a library’s data center and preferentially wipe out ebooks, like digital Huns or Vandals.