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

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.
    Perhaps my favorite kind of reading happens at palmy beach resorts. There’s always a stack of used paperbacks at a beach resort. With dog-eared and salt-encrusted pages brittle from exposure to the sun and scores of readers, these books are left out at night in a makeshift library, home perhaps to hermit crabs and wasps. But as e-reader costs come down, I actually expect that we’ll start seeing a bunch of left-behind e-readers instead of paperbacks at beach resorts.
    Five or so years from now, you’ll be using someone’s discarded Nook or Kindle to read in a hammock in the lilac-scented wind, swinging in late-afternoon sunlight to a gentle breeze with a gentle book. Their eInk screens will be sun stained, and the saltwater won’t do them any good. The power chargers will go missing, and the wires will get frazzled and frayed. But on the plus side, you’ll be able to surf the web—albeit more slowly than you’d like on your laptop—while listening to tiki music, your stomach rumbling in anticipation of dinner and a frozen margarita.
    How about you? Do you have a favorite sunny nook or diner where you prefer to read? Do you prefer reading in train stations, on airplanes, or sitting cross-legged in the aisles of an expansive, book-filled library?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/2.html

The Origin of Ebooks
    The ebook revolution started in 2003 when the vice president of research for Sony spent a week trapped in an ice cave after a skiing accident. He had a broken leg and was forced to drink his own urine until he was rescued. As he stared at his cell phone, hoping for a signal, he thought, “If only I had a book about wilderness survival on a cell phone or some other device that I could pull up right away.” And that’s when the idea for Sony’s first e-reader hit him…
    That’s not what happened, of course.
    The origin of ebooks has more to do with technological inevitability. It’s like the story of printing itself—Johannes Gutenberg was in the right place at the right time and knew enough about minting and metallurgy to make it happen. The founders of the ebook revolution were also each in the right place at the right time.
    And because the creation of ebooks involved technology, there’s no one origin story, no pat answer for how they came to be. Like all stories, that of the ebook revolution has as many twisted roots and beginnings as there are people who were part of the story.
    You could, for example, trace the roots to the invention of electrophoretic ink. Xerox discovered eInk in the late 1970s but then mothballed their invention when they couldn’t figure out how to sell it. In the late 1990s, pioneers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rediscovered eInk and improved it, and it’s partly due to their efforts that we have ebooks now.
    Even before the dot-com boom got underway, there were predictions that eInk would be commercially ready as early as 2003, and anyone could have been the first to launch an e-reader. But Sony was in the right place at the right time.
    Like most companies that sell consumer electronics, Sony has to invent a major new product every year to stay competitive, and eInk technology had matured to such a point by 2003 that Sony decided to use it to manufacture an e-reader. Insiders at Sony have told me that the ebook team’s budget was tiny compared to the budget for Sony’s TV division. In fact, the ebook team had to salvage parts from the Sony Walkman to make the first Sony e-reader. So even if the eInk technology was mature, the Sony e-reader was expensive and only available to the top echelon of the reading population in Japan, where it was first released.
    Of course, if an e-reader were to launch anywhere first, it would have to be Japan! The Japanese are among the most techno-literate of all cultures. I’ve traveled to Japan a lot, and I always smile when I encounter new tech marvels there, feeling rather like a bearded German in a fur cap from Gutenberg’s time transplanted to modern-day Tokyo.
    I’ve gone to the Sony showroom to see the display of next year’s toys and gadgets, the talking dogs and robot servants, things that you won’t see on shelves in the United States for months or maybe years. I remember once standing outside a Tokyo convenience store for five minutes, trying to figure out the way inside, before noticing a subtle