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

our culture. Ten years ago, hardly anyone talked about the book-publishing business. Even editors and publishers were bored with it. Movies and TV were much more exciting. But today, you can find stories about the ebook revolution online and in newspapers almost every day. Why is this so fascinating to people?
    I believe it’s because books had a solidity to them. They represented the accumulated weight of our culture. Books were the last bastion of the analog. Prior to the Kindle, all other forms of media had been digitized. Music, movies, TV shows, video games, even newspapers were available on the web for instant download and instant gratification. But books remained in print.
    But now, the last bastion of the analog, the last stalwart bulwark, has finally been cracked, and books are available for digital download. With the advent of ebooks, books will never quite be the same. Now, our eyes will grow accustomed to LCD screens and eInk displays instead of paper softly lit by glowing fireplace embers at night. Our kids will never know the subtle way that books get scarier by night as you curl up under the covers with a flashlight to read.
    These next few years will be momentous for the book industry, as it shifts from a purely physical mode to a digital mode. But this shift into the digital is happening everywhere, not just with books. Everything we take for granted in the physical world is up for grabs in the digital world, including core concepts like ownership of ourselves and our creations, digital or otherwise.
    As we transition our lives wholesale into Facebook and Twitter and communicate more with email than face to face, what does it really mean to own something or even to “be” in the purely existential sense of Hamlet in his soliloquy? What does it mean as our books shift to the cloud from our trusty wooden bookshelves and from neat or perhaps messy stacks next to our beds? What does it mean as our media—our books and songs and movies—are no longer real-world things with any substance that we can feel with our fingers? What does it mean as we move our memories online into social networking services or as we post our photos onto websites like Flickr instead of printing them out at the pharmacy and putting them into photo albums?
    These questions persist and will only grow harder to answer over time.
    All the papers, all the records and receipts of our lives, will go digital next. There’ll be ways of browsing them, handheld devices that we can use to browse our own lives through these collections of bus tickets and love letters that once meant so much to us.
    I think it’s a stretch to say that we’ll live out our lives entirely in the digital world like cyberpunk authors of the 1980s would have had you believe, that we’ll sell off our furniture and live instead with bare-bones lamps and beds made of origami that can be crushed underfoot when they’re no longer needed, that we’ll live in small shacks like U-Stor-It lockers, jacked into computers, and that we will only care about our avatars and the clothes they wear. It’s a stretch to think that we’ll live this way, but nobody knows. What it means to be alive in a digital sense is still up for grabs.
    Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about the seven wonders of the ancient world. In particular, the fact that some still exist. I’d thought that the Pyramids of Egypt were the only wonders of the ancient world that still remained, but actually, there are remains of almost all the other monuments from antiquity. There are chunks of masonry of the Lighthouse at Alexandria in the Mediterranean Sea, remaining from when the lighthouse was toppled by an earthquake. There are fragments and sculptures from the Temple of Artemis held at the British Museum after being recovered by early archaeologists.
    There are still ruins of the basement levels of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and you can go there and walk among the ruins of an ancient wonder. It’s even said that the base that supported the Colossus of Rhodes still survives at a church a mile away from the bay where the Colossus was said to have once towered. And who knows? One day, there may be a cuneiform tablet unearthed that contains a plan for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
    Though the Old World has been scoured by archaeologists, they’re always turning up new things. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the last of the seven ancient wonders, no longer survives, but the workshop where it