The same will hold true for future e-readers. If anything, prices will drop to levels so scary that corporate accountants and decision-makers at major retailers will need to have nerves of steel.
Bookmark: Lost Libraries
In doing research for this book, I wanted to watch old TV episodes of Oprah to find the day when Oprah discussed the Kindle with Jeff Bezos. It was a pivotal day for Kindle. Based on her show, the original Kindle sold out forever. In its way, the interview between Jeff and Oprah was a unique moment in history—for books, anyway. Between the two of them, Jeff and Oprah had done more than anyone else to promote and sell books in this century. You’d have to go back a hundred years to find another person who singlehandedly had as much impact on reading, and that was Andrew Carnegie, who opened 2,500 free libraries around the country at a time when American libraries were closed to the public.
But just a mere two years after the Oprah show aired, it’s no longer available anywhere on the internet or even the undernet. The show had a daily viewership in the millions, but it isn’t available anymore, with the exception of occasional bootleg clips here and there, like bits of papyrus buried in the Egyptian desert of the internet.
Media has a surprisingly short shelf life. For example, only four of the films of Theda Bara survive. The others are all gone, lost. Theda Bara was the original Hollywood vamp, one of the most massively popular actresses in all of movie history. In 1917, her film Cleopatra had the biggest budget of any film up to that point, $500,000, and that was at the end of World War I! And yet, all that remains of the film and Theda’s risqué outfits is a smudgy, five-second clip that was rescued from the vaults of the film studio as it was burning down decades later.
Theda Bara isn’t unique in this sense. Only ninety seconds of footage exists from one of the first animated movies, The Centaurs, made ten years before Disney came onto the scene. One of the first Westerns, Devil Dog Dawson, only survives as a thirty-eight-second fragment, found by accident in a mislabeled film can in Ohio. The first Technicolor film, On with the Show, a crowning success that raked in the modern equivalent of $2 billion in revenues, is now completely lost, although somehow, absurdly, a twenty-second color clip was found in a toy projector in the 1970s.
History was harsh with Theda Bara and a lot of other silent film stars, but it’s just as harsh with books. If you look back to the ancient world, there were three major libraries. First and foremost was the library of Alexandria in Egypt with about half a million volumes, then the library of Pergamum in Greece with 200,000 books, and then finally the library of Harran in Turkey. These three libraries held most of the books of the ancient world, and scholars still gnash their teeth and tear out their hair thinking about all the conquerors in the intervening centuries who dumped these books into rivers or burned them for fuel.
The story of books in the ancient world is a sad one. Anthony dismantled the library of Pergamum as a wedding present to Cleopatra. He emptied the shelves and sent all the books to Alexandria. But that library didn’t last long, because it was repeatedly decimated by fires and finally Islamic conquest. The only sizeable collection of books from the ancient world survived in Harran, a dusty outpost in Turkey where all the scholars fled from Egypt and Greece with their books. The books stayed hidden there until Arab scholars rediscovered and retranslated them, leading in part to the Renaissance of knowledge around Gutenberg’s time.
The fate of these ancient libraries is instructive and offers models of what might happen with corporate mergers and ebooks. Is it too hard to imagine a future where Google and Apple merge and combine their vast ebook libraries—only to suffer the slings and arrows of corporate fortune and go bankrupt one day, the books disappearing as the servers get shut down and rust, as distant data centers become overgrown with ivy and vines? Perhaps Amazon survives for a while before it, in turn, is acquired by some future new-media company, its ebooks relegated to an archive, perhaps to survive, perhaps not.
What would it be like to live in a future where all media is consolidated under one company? Not only would that company be able to set arbitrarily high prices on content, but it could also bury any content in its vaults, effectively censoring it. And what would it be like if that company failed, went bankrupt, or worse, lost its media archives? What if all the content was destroyed, perhaps through a massive server outage or an act of internal sabotage by a disgruntled employee or a digital ebook-eating virus?
Such a loss is too catastrophic to consider. But it could happen. Technological obsolescence not only happens to hardware and software, but also to institutions. After all, there were only three major libraries in the ancient world—and only one of them survived long enough for its books to be retranslated and preserved. Likewise, there are only three major digital media retailers now—Apple, Amazon, and Google. Which of these three, if any, do you think will survive? Fast-forward a hundred years: what do you think it would be like if one company monopolized our media?
The Future of Writing
The print revolution in Gutenberg’s time was truly revolutionary because it allowed knowledge to be distributed to masses of people. It was no longer necessary to hoard parchment, and books weren’t only available for the elite. Printing has undergone changes since then, but most of them have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
For example, when mass-market paperbacks emerged in the mid-1930s, they weren’t revolutionary. Mass-market paperbacks were pioneered by the Penguin publishing house, which took the novel approach of producing books from cheap pulp, hence the term “pulp fiction.” In fact, the mass-market paperback books themselves could be recycled into pulp and reused as paper for the publisher’s next mass-market paperback. All the books you see in grocery-store checkout aisles and airports owe their existence to the mass-market paperback format. The idea was evolutionary because it allowed books to be sold for even cheaper prices and for incrementally more people to read them.
Don’t get me wrong; we need evolutionary improvements.
But revolutions are acts of genius. They take multiple evolutionary improvements and compress them into one new product. Gutenberg’s printing was revolutionary because it combined multiple evolutionary improvements (moveable type, the printing press, and oil-based inks). The iPhone was revolutionary in the same way (large touchscreen phone, apps, GPS, and unlimited data plans), and so were ebooks.
As a culture, we can’t go back to the pre-iPhone days of the mere cell phone. And we can’t go back to the pre-ebook days of Borders, B. Dalton, and your local bookseller. In part, that’s because these stores are closed, bankrupted. The immediacy of digital ebook downloads and the convenience of a cloud-based library have replaced them. Moreover, ebooks are eternal.