Jason Merkoski: Burning the Page

I can only plead with those in the future who read this to remember that if not for us, there would be no digital books today, and the future would be less rich and nuanced. If not for us, future readers wouldn’t be floating as brains in an etheric vat, surrounded by digital books and videos and music as they sample from all of human culture like it’s one vast buffet for the mind. Those who read this years from now, please don’t forget that the future wasn’t always digital and that books weren’t always electronic.

Because without the ebook revolution, the future could never have happened.

The ebook revolution is the story of a small group of people who set out to change the way the world reads. I mentioned before how I found it at once eerie and amazing to be in a meeting with Jeff Bezos, scrutinizing the number of lines that should appear on an ebook’s page, because it was the same kind of thinking Gutenberg used more than five hundred years earlier. And like Gutenberg’s team, this small group of people at Amazon worked their way up from square one to reinvent reading. And we succeeded. Reading has not only been transformed but also rebooted.

But this success came with a cost. There were unintended consequences of this success, which meant that many ebook features had to be shelved at Amazon. It became important for Amazon and other device makers to keep up with their competition, which meant that certain innovative features were deprioritized so that resources could be spent on the arms race of keeping up with competitors. These ebook features will eventually be built; I’m not worried about that.

Amazon launched the ebook revolution, but now, the future of books is being tended to by people outside Amazon’s walled garden. By innovative publishers or venture-capital-funded startups or iconoclastic propeller-heads. Innovation is out in the world now. It’s out of the hands of Amazon and other technology giants. I believe the smaller, more nimble, more purpose-driven groups will succeed in building these features out. And of course, as always, the readers ultimately win.

Innovation sparked the ebook revolution. And while companies like Amazon and Apple are now raging bulls whose horns are locked in competitive combat, that innovation has gone out into the world. Publishers, as well as authors, are able to innovate. Readers themselves can innovate.

We ourselves, as readers, can reshape the future of the book!

We can reengage the way that books work in our own lives and fan the flame of reading again. In my generation, books have lost people’s attention spans, lost them to TV and movies and video games and the internet. But now books are being revitalized. Reading has never been more interesting, and it’s all thanks to ebooks.

I said earlier that, to the brain, there’s no difference between the words in a book and the words in an ebook, but ebooks introduce us to more than just words. They introduce us to other people and let us talk to our friends and family, right in the margins of an ebook. New life is being breathed into reading by the ebook revolution. If reading can be saved in our ADHD culture, then it’s thanks to innovative ideas from Reading 2.0 and to pioneering publishers and retailers and tech startups large and small.

I’m happy that I had a hand in making the ebook revolution happen. I did a lot for digital books. I turned the Kindle flywheel a few turns. I turned a page of the history book, turned books into ebooks. I burned the printed page and fanned the flames, helped to kindle a revolution.

I’m happy to have participated in the Kindle, along with a bunch of others. They’re people I sometimes miss and sometimes don’t, but all had charisma and character. There were enough characters on the Kindle team for a new font. At the very least, there was enough of a cast on Kindle to make a movie about it. BlackBerry-addled vice presidents, Jeff Bezos’s endless array of executive assistants, and engineers with barbeque stains on their shirts debating death matches between killer whales and tigers. They were all part of this ebook revolution, all part of something—well, something magical. Something revolutionary. As revolutionary as the invention of books themselves in Gutenberg’s day.

We don’t know what it was like in Gutenberg’s workshop, of course. But we can imagine the darkened interior, perhaps see the lampblack and soot. We can imagine the sounds of molten metal being poured into molds or the occasional scream as someone scalds himself, a spattle of molten metal on his skin, or perhaps it was someone’s finger that got caught in the printing press. We had it easier at Amazon; there were no molten metal mishaps, but we kindled a revolution nonetheless.

What we achieved will have consequences in the decades and centuries to come. But inevitably, Amazon will become just another name in the pages of the history books—or rather, history ebooks. Perhaps in the future nobody speaks of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Perhaps in the future, corporate entities are treated as people and our history is written by the likes of Apple and the Internet Archive and Google. Perhaps history is written about corporations by corporations. And it may well be in such a distant future that nobody really recalls that people like you and me brought digital books to life, that we made this quiet, bloodless revolution happen. That’s fine. We did it, even if nobody else will know about it.

We did it. And I wish that for just once in corporate culture, people took time to celebrate in a human way. I wish that just once Jeff Bezos brought us all together in a big ballroom, everyone on the Kindle team. I wish that just once he said nothing about flywheels, nothing corporate.

I wish that just once we all paused to celebrate what we achieved, that we wordlessly reached out to one another, held each other’s hands, and laughed like children, dancing in a circle. We could put aside our paychecks and all the politics, put aside our differences, and everyone could simply hold hands and pause before bowing to the audience, as this chapter in the history book closes, like a curtain falling over the stage.

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.

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.