When I visited one of Google’s data centers, which holds their own ebook cloud, I was amazed. Even though I’d seen these types of buildings before, it was like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where the Lost Ark is packed into a crate and taken down distant corridors lined ceiling-high with such crates, a vast warehouse space. But instead of being deathly quiet, the Google data center was humming and throbbing with fast gigabit cables snaking everywhere, a hum of lights and circuitry.
The people who work inside these clouds wear pagers twenty-four hours a day. They get up in the middle of the night when their pager goes off to alert them of an outage or a hard drive that needs to be replaced or a network that needs to be restarted by kicking it a few times. These clouds of data are managed so tightly, with monitors and alarms that go off at the slightest hiccup, that they’re more reliable than almost anything else you can imagine. They’re definitely more reliable than your library or mine. We have a greater chance of having our houses burglarized and our books stolen than you have of worrying about whether a given cloud gets shut down.
Because of clouds, you can expect to get used to big, empty bookshelves inside people’s homes. Personal libraries will move to the web. True, you can put your personal library on any of today’s Kindles, but the more you put into your Kindle’s memory, the more you will find that searching is slowed down. So retailers will eventually move this search function to the web, where you’ll be able to look up words or phrases from any number of books that you have. Some of the more enlightened retailers will show you results for physical as well as digital books, perhaps depending on whether you bought the physical book from them or not.
And you can use the cloud to search inside your books, bringing Google search technology to bear on your own personal library. Assuming, of course, that a given book has already been digitized by Google. And over time, they all will be. Instead of walking your fingers down the spines of all your books to pick one to read, you’ll go to a single e-reader sitting on an otherwise empty bookshelf. With just a few taps of your finger against the touch screen, you’ll be able to find any of your books from your home or your office, or from the subway or a sunny hammock somewhere in Central America.
Lacking physical proximity to your content will no longer be a barrier to readability. This will be especially helpful if you’re a student or you’re researching something, looking for the one idea you need like a needle in a haystack of books.
All that remains is for some sort of bridge to be built between what you already own and what’s on the cloud, some way of proving to Google that you already own a physical version of a given book. I can imagine an innovator getting into this space and creating a service that lets you send receipts or photographs to Google for books you’ve already bought.
Once you show proof that you bought a given book, the book would be unlocked on the cloud and yours to read online, without you having to buy it yet again. Because that’s the thing: buying a new ebook is only half of what it will take to digitize our personal libraries. The other half is digitizing the existing analog content already in our possession. Whoever licks that problem will make it possible for us to finally become fully digital readers in our lifetime.
I think Google is incredibly intelligent and far-thinking, and eventually they’re going to own our personal libraries. They’ve been working for the last decade on digitizing content, trying to scan all the books from all the world’s libraries and place them in their cloud.
I’m personally a big advocate of literacy, and I’ve got a collector’s mentality. Although I know authors who are in an uproar about what Google is doing, I say, “Bring it on!”
When the Sony e-reader was first introduced, it was touted as being able to hold almost a hundred ebooks. The first Kindle could hold a thousand. Subsequent devices increased the amount of storage—but the cloud liberates us completely. I think the cloud is amazing, because it has the promise of storing all the books we’ve ever owned. Cloud-based companies like Google know this and are building out their clouds to store more and more. You can almost see the iron girders and mechanical struts in the sky, somehow lofting above it all.
This bountiful, ever-expanding cloud seems good, until you realize that it may come with a terrible price. It may mean that we no longer own our digital goods.
Ownership is already a difficult matter with digital possessions, because there’s nothing tangible. You can’t touch a bit or a byte. But you can at least store a digital copy of an ebook on a drive somewhere by backing it up. In fact, many people advocate doing such backups, even though Amazon and the others have secure copies of your content in their clouds. I think, however, that if publishers and retailers could get their way, you wouldn’t even have a digital file. Ebooks would simply be streamed, one page at a time, while you read. There would be no trace of them on your device afterward.
This, after all, is how TV shows have historically worked. You just watch what comes over the airwaves. This is also how Netflix works. And it’s how music services like Spotify and Pandora work. Even the Google Book product works this way. It simply isn’t an option to save a local copy of a song or movie. It’s in the cloud, and all you’re able to do is rent the content. The same may soon be true with ebooks. All you may own are the rights to read a book but not to own a copy of the actual content.
It’s a scary thought, with long-ranging implications—and in my opinion, few of them are for the best. We seem to be boomeranging back to the early days of broadcast media, to the time when radio and TV content were streamed over the airwaves and only rarely preserved on audiocassette or videotape.
With this in mind, I think that companies like Google are smart to focus on content first. You can have the best e-reader, but if your content selection is lackluster, you’re just going to be a flash in the digital pan. You can be the talk of the town at the Consumer Electronics Show, the yearly trade show for gadgeteers in Las Vegas, but content is a long-tail proposition, and the accumulation of selection takes time. I know this from leading an ebooks team at Amazon. I know how long it takes to digitize all these books.
Though Google got into the game late, you haven’t seen the last of them. Because although their strategy makes their results seem low key in the short-term, it positions them perfectly to drive and lead the next phase of reading, what I call Reading 2.0.
Bookmark: Bookshelves
As a kid, I used to enjoy mock living rooms.
The furniture stores of my youth seemed to sprawl on forever, with one mock room following another. Some were decorated in sleek 1980s decor, while others were warmer and more homey. It was an amazing experience to walk through a furniture store and go through one iteration of a room after the next. Endless foyers with endless opportunities for playing board games or watching TV.
I remember the mock living rooms most because they all had bookshelves. I was drawn to the books, of course. Oddly, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why some titles were chosen over others for display in the rooms. The books were all hardcovers, as if even in these mock living rooms, it was important to demonstrate wealth and prestige, perhaps as a nod to the “libraries” of the wealthy, special rooms whose walls were ornamented with leather-bound books. In retrospect, the furniture stores likely bought the books by the pound.
Today’s furniture stores are more sophisticated and even have cardboard cutouts of computers inside the mock living rooms. But books are still on the bookshelves of these rooms, as if they’re waiting for their owners to one day return and read them. Of course, the owners will never return home, since the furniture stores are simply aspirational galleries for homemakers. And yet, I’ve never once seen an e-reader inside a furniture-store showroom, mock or otherwise.