Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  The packaging on the original Kindle box shows an illustrated history of the written word. Starting from the left-hand side, you see symbols in hieroglyphics and cuneiform, then you see Greek and Roman letters carved in stone, then woodblock medieval printing, finally followed on the right-hand side of the box by letters in modern alphabets on paper. The story of the written word is a story of evolution. In fact, the history of printing is one of a decline in durability and a rise in convenience.

  Printing started 6,000 years ago with cuneiform tablets from the Middle East. These were created from wedges carefully cut from mud, fired in a kiln, and made into tablets. The process had more in common with sculpture than writing, but it was durable. We’re still uncovering clay tablets from all over that region. I’d like to think that printing was invented to tell the stories of noble heroes and the elder goat-gods with their white beards, but no, most of these tablets were just bills and invoices. For example, in October 2012, an archive of 24,000 cuneiform business documents was found in central Turkey. It’s a 6,000-year-old hoard of checks, tax forms, and loan notes.

  Almost as old as clay tablets is papyrus, which is made from woven reeds like those that grow along the Nile. They’re not as durable as clay and gradually decay, although in the Egyptian desert, you can still find fragments of papyrus preserved by desert sands and dust through the subsequent millennia. As writing boomed, the supply of reeds started dwindling, and in the fifth century BC, a new type of writing technology was developed, in which animal skins were made into parchment scrolls. Parchment lasts about a thousand years, and being made of animal skin, it’s quicker to decay than papyrus and quick to crack, as anyone who owns a leather jacket or suede pants knows.

  Paper was invented next, an even more convenient technology for printing, because wood pulp could be mashed up, laid out on racks to dry, and then cut into many thin sheets. It was much cheaper to make than any previous technology, but less durable. Even now, almost 2,000 years after its invention, paper only lasts about 500 years at best before yellowing and brittling to dust. Even the use of metal salts to make more durable acid-free paper isn’t a recipe for immortality.

  Over the last millennium, there have been other regional innovations in print technology, such as the use of palm leaves in Southeast Asia or birchbark among some of the Native Americans, but by and large, human civilization has predominantly used paper until now.

  The history of book printing is wormy with false starts. For example, woodblock printing emerged around 200 AD in China before being rediscovered in Europe more than a thousand years later. Likewise, movable type was discovered and used to print books in Korea seventy-five years before it was rediscovered by Johannes Gutenberg, the credited inventor of modern printing. But it wasn’t a single invention alone that sparked the blossoming of books in the Middle Ages. Gutenberg combined many inventions including moveable type, as well as the printing press and oil-based inks. The combination of all of these allowed book printing as we know it to succeed.

  We don’t know how he came up with these ideas and merged them together. In fact, we don’t even know what Gutenberg looked like. The earliest illustrations of him didn’t emerge until well after he died. Except for his innovation, he’s an almost absolute enigma, except for the occasional lawsuit filed against him. It would have been amazing if Gutenberg or one of his workers had written about making the first books, but they never did, or if so, their writing didn’t endure. There’s no written record of Gutenberg’s workshop, but I imagine it would have been a lot like where newspapers were once printed, before the linotype and lead type were replaced by photography and digital typesetting.

  The technology Gutenberg used in the 1450s was almost the same as the newspaper technology at my father’s company three hundred years later in the latter half of the twentieth century. When I was a kid, I used to visit my father’s newspaper on weekends. I would see enormous linotype machines that looked like a cross between typewriters and church organs, overheated machines belching steam while their operators sat with their burly 1970s mustaches and sweat-stained T-shirts, working to produce metal type.

  The type would then be put into racks and ratcheted in with wrenches. Each line of the newspaper would be set with spacers between lines, and then the whole rack would be moved on an enormous system of pulleys to a room where it would be cast in molten metal, into a metal plate that could finally be used to print a page of newsprint on rolls of paper with ink.

  The pressmen who worked there had mangled fingers and ink stains like semipermanent tattoos on their arms. They’d be smoking cigarettes from the moment they came to work until they left at 4:00 a.m., working late every day to print the news. In the lunchroom, they’d munch on hot dogs and donuts, the smell of sauerkraut as thick as the ink stains on the walls.

  I imagine Gutenberg’s workshop to be somewhat similar, with ink-stained and metal-scarred men working in dark rooms, sharing their lunches at a dark table in the back, drinking beer together. And maybe there’s a dog or two in the corner, nuzzling at some grunt sleeping off the beer he had for lunch. The workshop would have been smoky from lampblack, boiling linseed oil, and cauldrons of molten lead.

  You would hear the sounds of the press as it was squeezed, like a grape press to make wine; you’d hear the groans of grunts as they turned the screws of the printing presses, the creaking of wet wood against metal. Scraps of books and Bibles would litter the floor, along with pages from calendars showing the best time to do bloodlettings or letters from the Pope printed to rally support against the Turks. There would be splurts of hardened metal on the floor and rows of metal slugs. With a word as soft and slippery as “slug,” it’s hard to imagine them being made out of metal, but a slug is a line of type made from copper, all the letters neatly arranged and ready to be inked for printing.

  In my mind, the workshop would be divided into sections for casting molten metal, for pressing it into paper with ink, and for the racks of moveable type that could be maneuvered into place to set each line by laborious line for whatever was being printed at the time. In Gutenberg’s day, it was too expensive to print an entire page of a book from one copper plate, which is how they did it at the newspaper when I was a child.

  Copper was only affordable enough for Gutenberg to do one line of type at a time. He could set a line and then disassemble the letters and words once that line was printed. If he needed to print more of the same Bibles or books, they would have to be hand-set from scratch, page by page, all over again. But it was the most he could afford.

  It was a dark and secretive workshop, just as secretive as any tech company today, for fear of outsiders stealing this brilliant idea. Even in the 1450s, secrecy was paramount. It was an age before patent law, and innovators had no other way to protect themselves besides confidentiality. There was talk at the time that the English and Dutch were developing their own printing presses, and Gutenberg had to be careful. So all the Germans in his workshop huddled together and kept their knowledge and books secret within the fortress of its walls.

  Amazon, Apple, and Google are a bit like medieval fortresses in their own ways. They’re secretive like China or Japan before they were opened up to Westerners, or like Tibet or Mecca, closed to foreigners, with rare exceptions like Sir Richard Burton, an explorer who dressed like a local and sneaked inside with his binoculars and surveying rods. In a way, it’s appropriate to speak of Amazon and other ebook companies in a medieval sense, because although ebooks seem so advanced, we’re really just emerging from the Dark Ages of reading today.

  Gutenberg was just as obsessive as Steve Jobs of Apple or Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He is known to have spent months worrying about how many lines of text should be printed on one page and varying the number to find the optimal balance between cost and aesthetics. By increasing the number of lines, he could reduce the number of pages that needed to be printed, but this made the book more difficult to read.

  Interestingly, I’ve seen the same
situation play out in Amazon’s conference rooms. I’ve been in meetings with Jeff and his vice presidents where he obsessed about the number of lines that would appear on the Kindle screen. I’ve seen his 3:00 a.m. emails after those meetings. I’ve seen his mind wriggle and squirm just as obsessively as Gutenberg’s, and about the same feature. It’s as if we had to reinvent printing during the ebook revolution, and men like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt were Gutenberg’s ghosts, reincarnated hundreds of years later.

  It’s still amazing to me that a billionaire like Jeff—with an enormous business empire and a company that makes rocketships, no less—would take hours out of his life to obsess about line spacing, of all things! But attention to detail matters. Revolutionary innovations and products live or die by such obsession—and I believe Jeff wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.

  Printing as we know it eventually emerged from the Dark Ages. The actual quantity of books produced during the early years was relatively small—but with every decade afterward, books became cheaper as new technologies were introduced. Mezzotint. Offset printing. Lithographs. Electric typesetting. The mass-market paperback. And as literacy around the world increased decade by decade, more and more books came to be printed because there was an audience for them.

  With the advent of internet technologies like eBay and Amazon, it was possible by the late 1990s to find and acquire almost any book ever written (for a price, anyway). By the turn of the twenty-first century, we were practically flooded with printed books. Once the bulwarks of wealth and prestige, once gilded and bound in fine leather and placed behind glass cabinets in showy libraries and drawing rooms, books were now cheap commodities. You could go to any used bookstore on a weekend and see racks and racks of books sitting forlornly under an awning—a sad sight for a book lover.

  As a culture, we’re still very bookish, very literate, even though books are no longer the entertainment medium of choice they once were. And while it’s easier to collapse at the end of a hard day on your soft couch in front of your TV or laptop to watch your favorite show, there’s still a place for books in our lives, because they are the rawest and truest form for telling stories and collecting, analyzing, and communicating information and ideas. The beauty of books is that you approach them at your own pace. Not only can you read at your own speed, but you also can skip from section to section, nonlinearly.

  Of course, books have their limitations. They’re heavy. They’re hard to lug around on a vacation or pack in boxes whenever you move into a new home. Books are cumbersome, and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for in them. They can get out of date quickly. They age and mildew, rot and crumble.

  Those of a future generation will one day look back on printed books with the same benign and befuddled expressions that we use when we look at floppy disks or those colossal IBM mainframes with spinning reels of tape that you see in the background of the villain’s lair in James Bond movies. Books are bulky, and an individual book doesn’t hold much data compared to what an e-reader can hold.

  Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m a book lover: some of my best friends are books. But I see the limitations of books, and I see ebooks as their natural continuation. And yes, this means that one of the challenges we’re going to have as ebook readers is to accept that reading is a technology-based experience. That means the culture of reading will evolve and change like all technologies do. This might seem troubling to some, but remember that print technology has also evolved over the centuries. It simply had a 500-year head start, and there aren’t many evolutions left for it.

  By the time you and I started reading as kids, print was basically done evolving. But we’re still on the rapid exponential rise of technology’s evolution for ebooks. Also, as an insider in the publishing and retail worlds, I can tell you that you’re going to start seeing far more ebooks and fewer print books. Readers are migrating to digital, and ebooks are a more attractive financial proposition for publishers; the economics are simply better.

  Print books will, of course, still be published, but primarily for blockbusters, the kinds of books that will get lots of press, lots of advertising. Of course, there will also still be an attractive market for print books as collectibles, whether they’re antiquarian books or special-edition commemorative hardcovers. But ebooks will rule the day, and when people a few years from now talk about “books,” what they’ll really be referring to are ebooks, not print books. Eventually the “e” will be dropped, and books will be assumed to be digital, just as most music is now digital; after all, we don’t refer to music as e-music.

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  The future of books is fraught with possibilities and dangers. With ebooks, we’re no longer reading on paper but on eInk or LCD screens, and although each type of screen has its own technology, behind every e-reader is a hard drive of some sort, something that stores the books you read.

  Hard drives are the new clay tablets for books. The reason we love them so much is that they’re so cheap to manufacture, these thin wafers of silicon and circuitry that are often made without any moving parts. Hard drives are ridiculously convenient, and our civilization rests on them; the web itself is supported by air-conditioned data centers all around the globe, vast buildings where hives of hard drives hum away.

  Convenient, yes, but also prone to failure. The average hard drive has a 25 percent chance of dying after three years, so there are employees at Google’s and Amazon’s data centers who do nothing all day long but trundle down corridors with carts of replacement drives. Hard drives are convenient as long as you have anything that resembles a computer or cell phone or e-reader, but with the consequence that any content on them is likely to disappear fast as once-hot electrons grow cool, as magnetic fields flicker and fade.

  At least clay tablets were given the dignity of turning into dust, but when ebooks die, it’s without a sigh. We can still archaeologically excavate former libraries and palaces in the Middle East and turn up tablets and parchment, but no one will be able to take a shovel to Apple’s data center in North Carolina thousands of years in the future and unearth all of these servers, power them up again, and recover all the ebooks they once held.

  Indeed, book technology has reversed itself. Clay tablets, once durable but inconvenient, have been replaced by hard drives, which are highly convenient but very fragile. And though our words are now more widespread than ever, they barely have the lifespan of a hamster or a gerbil. They’re short-lived unless they’re constantly restored and backed up to new hard drives, to new computers. Ours is a culture that dances on the edge of ephemerality.

  If our servers slept for too long or if we left our iPads unplugged for too long, we’d wake up like Rip Van Winkle to find all of our book culture erased. And in the ultimate progression, if you look at this curve of decaying durability and increasing convenience over time, the inevitable trajectory is for our words to last as long as the twenty-four-hour life of the mayfly, to be as ephemeral as a June bug’s jitter. Someday, our ephemeral but instant thoughts themselves will be beamed in a quickenth of a second from brain to brain in some ultimate evolution of print technology. But will they last beyond that fraction of an instant?

  I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words. And digitization raises questions: since we’ve traded durability for culture, what happens if there are massive failures in our culture’s data centers? What happens if ebooks are one day wiped out? Viruses can now target nuclear power plants, so is it not conceivable that viruses could be developed to destroy ebooks?

  Bookmark: Reading in Bed

  All of our brains are alike in some fundamental ways. We can all get into a book, whether it’s in print or digital format. We can all zone out and ignore the fact that the book is on an eInk screen or is bound into pages with glue that smells like fish vomit. We can ignore these things if it’s a really entrancing book.

  One of the times I enjoy reading the mos
t is at night. I love reading in that golden hour before bed, where you’re able to put away your computer, your cell phone, anything distracting that keeps your mind unduly alert. And instead, you allow yourself to relax into a damn fine book. It doesn’t need to be a printed book; an ebook works just as well. Because as far as the brain’s concerned, the experience of reading an ebook can be the same as reading in print, in that you’re no longer aware of the medium itself—most of the time, anyway.

  At night, though, when you’re trying to sleep, using LCD screens or backlit e-readers can actually zap the production of melatonin in your body, keeping you awake longer and degrading the quality of the sleep you do eventually get. Thus, I rarely read a tablet before bed, preferring an eInk reader instead.

  If you’re using a glare-free e-reader that doesn’t zap you with light, reading in bed is even more of a pleasure than before. E-readers are lighter than most books, and you can annotate them without having to fumble in the dark for a pen. You’re absorbed into the book, and you can fall asleep with the ebook in your hands.

  In fact, this is my test of how well a new e-reader is built. If I can fall asleep with it while I’m reading at night—feeling my eyelids growing heavy and closing with that gluey cotton-candy sensation of sleep overcoming me, feeling the e-reader slip out of my hands and onto my bed—then it worked. The ebook was able to transport me into that stuporous yet sublimely sensible state of pre-sleep, the state in which I have my best ideas, when I’m able to let go of the rational and uninhibit the intuitive. I don’t care whether you’re reading in bed or on an airplane or on a train; you can still fall asleep with a really good digital book, if you allow yourself the leisure to do so.

  But that’s just me; I like reading in bed. Some people love to read with cigarettes and endless cups of coffee in a Manhattan diner. Some people love to read on their computers, endlessly following one link to the next, one website to another. Some people like to read at work between bites of their sandwiches or salads, their office doors closed during their lunch breaks, indulging in some downtime, some time for their mind, time for a book. Some people don’t like to read, but there’s no room for them in this book.