Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

linguistics, about Sanskrit, a language I had been teaching myself; I talked about publishing, my love of books, and writing. Finally, I talked about my technical expertise and my visions for the future. I aced my interviews and played Amazon against Google during salary negotiations.
    Amazon had a director call to sell me on working there. I still remember where I was the day I spoke to him—sitting on my floor in a patch of sunlight, listening to his voice crackle from more than a thousand miles away on my rural phone line. I lived in a remote place, at the very end of the power and phone grids. Through the static, he hinted that Amazon was working on a secret ebook project, and he offered me any position I wanted on it.
    I chose the hardest one—working on a team that had to invent a way of making ebooks from physical books. I was in Seattle two weeks later at new employee orientation, watching an overhead projection of Jeff Bezos’s head welcoming me to work, telling me to have fun and make history. I joined the Kindle team, and for a few years, I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg’s workshop. Most of what we did on Kindle was digital, so you can’t physically see it; it’s like the part of an iceberg below the ocean. The outward form of what you see is a piece of plastic and metal, a Kindle.
    What you don’t see are the warrens of cubicles from which Amazon reps called publishers every day asking for more books. You don’t see all the engineers, all the code they’ve written to make payments to book publishers happen every month or to manage wireless downloads or to audit the books in users’ libraries to make sure they’re still there. The Kindle itself is just the tip of the iceberg, and its true workings are invisible. That’s exactly how Amazon wanted it to be.
    Yes, I did have fun at Amazon, and I made history. I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all. I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks. I worked with Wired magazine and Random House. I talked about the future of books with the commissioner of the NFL and the founder of Wikipedia.
    I also joined a crazy tribe whose members share their word-sparks with one another. And by this I don’t mean just Amazon: members of this tribe come from all avenues of publishing. A special kind of person is drawn to publishing—they’re often idealistic, as their decisions are made for the written word itself, for something greater than themselves, some spark or idea they want to share with others. These kinds of people are the innovators, the idealists, and they are a vital part of this book because they’re revitalizing how we read. They’re breathing new life into books.
    This book talks about publishing, authorship, and the myriad ways we engage with the written word. While my perspective is rooted in my experiences working at Amazon, this book also discusses Apple and Google and publishers large and small. Like others at Amazon, I took my turn spinning the Kindle flywheel, from when it was just a glint of an idea in Jeff Bezos’s eye to the whirlwind it is now, a phenomenon fanning the flames of reading around the globe. This book is the story not just of Kindle, but of the ebook revolution itself—what it is, where it’s headed, and what it means for all of us, for good and for bad.

Introduction to “Bookmarks”
    In the ebook revolution, the nature of books and the reading process is changing. Ebooks include everything useful that came before them in books. They add to the reading experience, not detract from it. But many now-familiar elements of print books are going the way of the dodo. Some will die out entirely; others will morph into something new. In part this is good—who’s going to miss paper cuts, after all? But with this change also comes the loss of familiar friends.
    The “bookmark” at the end of each chapter takes a look at an element of print books we have come to love or loathe and how it will be affected, transformed, or eliminated by the move to ebooks. As used here, the term “bookmark” is kind of a visual pun. Not only does it refer to an artifact from