Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  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.

  Bookmark: Used Books

  There’s an enormous market now for used books—a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly puts it in the billions of dollars. Because this market is so big, it allows us as readers to either buy used books ourselves or read used books that have been donated to libraries.

  But there’s no such thing yet as a used ebook.

  All purchases are individual, and DRM makes sure that a book that you purchased can only be read on your own device. Of course, there’s a dark undernet for pirated ebooks. As an experiment, I searched the peer-to-peer networks for The New York Times bestsellers available this week in ebook format, and I found pirated versions of all of them, contributed by anonymous and technically sophisticated book lovers. And don’t doubt that these folks love books, even though they’re pirates.

  Still, though there’s no legally sanctioned and technologically functional used ebook market yet, it’s going to happen. I predict it will be started first by a company like Barnes & Noble that allows the resale of its ebooks through other websites—that is, third-party companies who will be able to sell ebooks to you at a discount perhaps, even though they buy the books directly from Barnes & Noble. There’s nothing strange about this reseller model. It’s used all the time for physical goods. I think the adoption of a reseller model for digital goods will open up a thriving used ebook market.

  Perhaps a time period from the original date of a book’s publication will have to pass, maybe a year or two, after which the book will be available as a used ebook sale. At that point, the ebook would be available at a reduced price.

  Or perhaps the laws of another country will allow used ebook sales, so you’ll end up going to an offshore website, like those that run legal online gambling sites, entities headquartered in Bermuda or Turks and Caicos. They’ll provide a marketplace for sellers and buyers, and these entities will take a small percent of each sale. They’ll be companies small enough to be run by one person, sitting in a beach chair in Bermuda and drinking a mai tai while his servers hum quietly in some nearby warehouse, raking in the cash and storing all the digital files.

  I think it would be healthy if we could have a used ebook market. There are even hopeful signs that it may be starting soon; in 2013, Amazon applied for a patent on the sale of used digital goods, including
ebooks. Used books—and by extension, used ebooks—would help readers, because more books could be bought at cheaper prices. This lets a reader get more bang from his or her buck. And it would help authors too, because being able to buy used ebooks means the author’s ideas and stories are kept in circulation longer. A book, once read, could be liberated from a Kindle or Nook and find another reader.

  The drawback to used ebooks—and the reason why so many retailers and publishers are against them—is that they might encourage book piracy.

  Piracy is possible for physical books, although to a much lesser extent. If a book is stolen from your house, it could be sold to a used bookstore, which in turn might resell it. But theft of physical books is rare, and it’s even rarer when a volume is resold and recognized—although that does happen. In 2010, experts at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, caught a thief who had stolen a first-edition Shakespeare volume from England ten years earlier. The thief had mutilated the book and ripped pages out, but it was still identifiable.

  It’s much harder to catch a digital book thief. Ebooks lack sophisticated watermarks or other identifying mechanisms, so one digital book looks a lot like another. This means that there’s no real way to identify whether a used ebook was resold after being rightfully purchased or illegally copied one or more times.

  In fact, because there’s no way to forensically differentiate a pirated ebook from a lawfully purchased one, the assumption is that any ebooks not sold by a major retailer must have been pirated. This taints the concept of used ebooks, which is unfortunate. At this point, used ebooks are presumed guilty of being pirated until proven innocent.

  I, for one, think we need used ebooks—but what about you? Would you buy a used ebook? Trade one with a friend? Do you wish you could donate some of your own ebooks to a library? Or do you feel ebooks are already priced well and that selling them for less would hurt the livelihoods of authors and publishers alike?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/10.html

  Fanning the Flames of Revolution

  As retailers like Barnes & Noble and Apple entered the e-reader market, they created increased competition for Amazon. But more importantly, and more positively for Amazon, their success signaled that the ebook market was evolving from mere innovation to full-blown revolution.

  And because the ebook revolution is largely technical, the best measure by which to view it is the theory of the diffusion of innovation.

  Everett Rogers wrote a book called The Diffusion of Innovations, in which he describes the five phases that an innovation goes through as it makes its way through a population. These phases can be used to understand the way consumers approach any new innovation, such as cars or cell phones or computers. Each phase is represented by a group of adopters in the society.

  Statistically speaking, the first 2.5 percent of the population to adopt a new technology are called innovators. The next 13.5 percent are early adopters, and the next 34 percent are the early majority. If you add up these three groups of people, you get 50 percent, half the population. The remaining two groups are the late majority, which represents the next 34 percent and, finally, the laggards, with the final 16 percent.

  The labels for these five phases in the diffusion of innovation speak for themselves. But to roughly sum it up, the younger and wealthier you are, the more you tend to find yourself on the side of the innovators. The more risk-averse and traditional you are, the more you find yourself with the laggards. Your social status and education level often follow the same progression.

  These factors correlate time and time again with every invention that’s been studied using the theory of diffusion of innovation. In fact, innovators and early adopters are no longer the only ones who speak about the diffusion of innovation. The theory has become part of the arsenal of tools used by marketers and product managers when they dream up new business ideas or gadgets. Whether you, as a consumer, are aware of this is unimportant to the people who make and market products, because the theory of diffusion of innovation is as real to them as the law of diminishing returns and the 80/20 principle.

  Here are a few examples of how the diffusion of innovation works. It took eighty-three years from the time refrigerators were first available in the United States for them to be available to more than half the households, which finally happened in 1940. Flush toilets were invented later than refrigerators, but they took only forty-three years before they reached everyone in the early majority. That accelerating trend has continued with more recent innovations. Home electricity took only twenty-two years before it reached half of all U.S. households. It took nineteen years for radio, fifteen years for TV, and only ten years for the World Wide Web.

  As we move further into the future, the diffusion of innovation happens faster. You don’t have to take my word for this; any study of the diffusion of innovation shows the same progression of this acceleration of culture throughout history. Perhaps this acceleration is caused by the explosion in innovations than can be reassembled to make still more new innovations. The acceleration can be bewildering if you’re unable to keep pace with it. To this day, my grandmother still refuses to use email, and whenever she has anything important to send, she uses a fax.

  When are ebooks likely to reach the early majority? Taking a conservative approach and assuming that will take ten years (the same amount of time it took for the internet to reach the early majority), that puts us squarely in 2016, ten years after Sony launched its first e-reader in the United States. I personally think it’ll happen faster, because I’m not conservative, and I see the acceleration of adoption rates across innovations. But even if the conservative estimate is right, half the people who read will have an e-reader of some sort by 2016—and possibly a year or so earlier.

  By the early majority phase, you’re at the sweet spot in the rate of adoption, when the most consistent growth is happening from year to year. My numbers tell me that’s where we are now—with the population of readers in the United States, at least. A 2012 report by Simba Information indicates that 24.5 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves ebook readers, and a 2012 Pew Internet study suggests that 33 percent of people in the United States own an e-reader or a tablet. The phase of the most rapid growth is happening now as reader revolutionaries are taking to the streets and subways with their e-readers. As trendsetters and early adopters, they’re being seen, and their ebook reading habits are being copied by others. Ebook-only content is helping the diffusion, as well. The ebook revolution is a bloodless revolution that spans all the acres of the imagination, across all of time and space to everywhere your imagination takes you while you read.

  Now, no one ever wrote a paean to flush toilets or refrigerators. No one rang a bell in 1950 during the heyday of the television, and no fireworks went off in 2001 when half the population found themselves on the internet. As far as I know, no one’s ever written a paean to a cell phone or even an ode to the humble wheel. But the invention of ebooks is different. It’s in a rarefied class almost all by itself, because it involves everything aspiring about the human spirit.

  The ebook revolution is ultimately about ideas, and in a very real way, we are our ideas. They’re the music that flows through our veins, the jolts of electricity that keep one day from blurring into the next. The revolution in reading has a tangible and noticeable effect on us as a population. The Simba Information report also suggests that a title originally only available as an ebook, Fifty Shades of Grey, may have been partially responsible for a 7 percent year-over-year shift in ebook reading in the U.S. population.

  Modern revolutions are more like microrevolutions. Modern political revolutions follow the same trend toward increased speed as innovations. The revolutions are instigated and completed faster than political revolutions of yore. This is related to the fact that we’re online with one another all the time. We’re a connected civilization, and this connection is accelerated more by ebooks than by flush toilets or refrigerators. We’re revolutionaries with one a
nother because we’re linked by ideas, by currents that ripple through our civilization in the books we write and read.

  And it’s not just that we have more access to books now or that they’re available almost anywhere within sixty seconds. The ebook revolution also means that we can take what we’ve read, and the ideas that have been sparked, and then communicate them at lightning speed to people all over the world—whether through annotations on the ebook or highlights others can see or social network postings on Facebook or Twitter where we can share an interesting passage from an ebook and our comments about it. Wherever we are and whenever we want, we can talk to others around the globe about a book, as if the world is our reading club and the author our best friend.

  When I said earlier that the Kindle was one of the two best inventions of the twenty-first century, I meant the concept of the Kindle, the concept of a portable e-reader and all the ebooks that can be read on it. I think that other devices since the original Kindle have vastly improved its basic features and added new ones. But they are all rooted in the Kindle. In terms of reading, the iPad owes as much to the Kindle as a smartphone owes to the humble rotary phone.

  Like the basic Kindle, current eInk e-readers still have a ways to go as actual gadgets. They may never truly compete with multifunction devices like the iPad or Google’s Nexus tablets or even the Kindle Fire released by Amazon. But what we have now is directionally indicative of a future that all book lovers should want to live in, the future of on-demand reading, of having any and every book that’s ever been published available to us no matter where we are.