Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading
Page 25
And in this dream I have, it wouldn’t just be Amazon people. No, in the ballroom next door there’d another party where everyone from Apple has come together. Everyone who cared an ounce about ebooks and the iPad are likewise celebrating. No more corporate platitudes or PowerPoints, just corks popping, wine flowing, people eating and dancing and laughing and just plain celebrating with all the honesty of early-childhood innocence. And yes, the next ballroom over has employees from Google, and the next one has everyone who worked on the Nook. Everyone is celebrating, everyone past and present.
We all stumbled onto a great thing with ebooks. But we’re all echoes, opportunistic echoes from an earlier time, all the way back to Gutenberg’s time when books as we know them were first invented. In my mind, as visions of ballrooms fade, I can see, out on the landscape beyond, a summer’s afternoon in the 1450s and a ghostly scene of Gutenberg and his workers coming out of his workshop. They come out with ink stains on their hands, smudged fonts on their shirts. Maybe Gutenberg himself has a glass of blackberry wine or a stein of beer, raised now to celebrate the first Bible that started it all, everyone celebrating these thick-inked books that now soar into the clouds.
http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/23.html
About the Author
Jason Merkoski was a development manager, product manager, and the first technology evangelist at Amazon. He helped to invent technology used in today’s ebooks and was a member of the launch team for each of the first three Kindle devices. Trained in theoretical math at MIT, he worked for almost two decades in telecommunications and e-commerce with America’s biggest online retailers, and he’s worked with publishers large and small to shape the future of ebooks. As a digital pioneer, he wrote and published the first online ebook in the 1990s. As a futurist, he’s equally at home in Seattle or Silicon Valley, although he’s drawn to the high desert of New Mexico, where he can string up his hammock and stare into the clouds and see ancient petroglyphs.