Read Online Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading by Jason Merkoski - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jason Merkoski
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in this same sense of protecting privacy, digital books are the best thing that ever happened to pornography, with the possible exception of the brown paper bag.
The drawback with pornography is that images can look awful on eInk, no matter how much you dither with them. The original Kindle’s 2-bit eInk screens, for example, only had four shades of gray, and of these, one was white and one was black, which didn’t leave much for nuance. Whether you’re trying to render a picture of the sky or of a woman’s thigh, it’s hard to get pornography to look good with only four colors. Depending on your stance on pornography, that’s either something wrong with eInk or something you’re glad e-readers don’t do well. Even with the Kindle2’s sixteen colors, digital pornography still sucked, although it did improve somewhat.
Clearly, there was potential for improvements in content beyond pornography. There was a whole universe of books to adapt to e-reading—including atlases, dictionaries, comics, travel guides, and textbooks!
Shortly after the Kindle2 launch, I talked to Kindle’s senior management and then took on the role of Kindle’s technology evangelist. I would be half evangelist and half product manager and focus on ebooks alone. A product manager is something like a practical futurist, someone who can think nine months into the future and see a product through from inception to launch. I would be able to dream big and make long-range improvements.
I was refreshed and revitalized, ready for a new chapter of my life at Amazon. I was on a plane every week as Amazon’s first technology evangelist. I would meet with publishers in their midtown Manhattan offices to explore new ebook ideas together. Then I’d be off to India or the Philippines to see how conversion houses were making ebooks and to tell them some of what I’d learned during my time at Amazon, feeding them bits of information that would make them work better and faster and cheaper for us. I was doing my small part with each player in this ebook ecosystem to move it forward and to find ways that publishers could spend less and convert more, so readers could have more ebooks to enjoy.
I saw colossal, warehouse-sized machines that stripped books of their spines in seconds, like wood chippers for books, but that were as precise as a doctor’s scalpel. At a technology park in India, I also saw an experimental array of quarter-million-dollar machines that were like animatronic spiders. They were used for nondestructive scanning, the high-end way to digitize content—unlike the cheaper method of hacking pages with machetes. The machine lifted a book and carefully turned its pages one by one so they could be photographed and digitized. Those animatronic spiders were so delicate that I would have trusted them to hold a baby and change its diaper.
Being an evangelist gave me a chance to engage with publishers worldwide, and I got to see the scramble firsthand as publishers adjusted to digital books. Some publishers reacted better than others; some, in fact, were downright revolutionary.
Ultimately, I think everyone who worked in those early years of ebooks was changed by the experience. We weren’t working just for paychecks. We were learning and growing. We changed from one month to the next, sort of like taking a paintbrush and a bucket of water and drawing your self-portrait on a hot sidewalk. You’d maybe be able to sketch half of your face before the water you’d already painted would start to fade and evaporate, so you’d never quite be finished.
We’re all sidewalk portraits painted with water on a hot summer’s afternoon. And there’s a holy fervor and zeal than you can see in the eyes of the ebook revolutionaries who are working as insiders, whether they work at the publishers or the retailers or as independent software vendors and sideline pundits. It would be one thing perhaps if we were merely part of the MP3 or digital video
The drawback with pornography is that images can look awful on eInk, no matter how much you dither with them. The original Kindle’s 2-bit eInk screens, for example, only had four shades of gray, and of these, one was white and one was black, which didn’t leave much for nuance. Whether you’re trying to render a picture of the sky or of a woman’s thigh, it’s hard to get pornography to look good with only four colors. Depending on your stance on pornography, that’s either something wrong with eInk or something you’re glad e-readers don’t do well. Even with the Kindle2’s sixteen colors, digital pornography still sucked, although it did improve somewhat.
Clearly, there was potential for improvements in content beyond pornography. There was a whole universe of books to adapt to e-reading—including atlases, dictionaries, comics, travel guides, and textbooks!
Shortly after the Kindle2 launch, I talked to Kindle’s senior management and then took on the role of Kindle’s technology evangelist. I would be half evangelist and half product manager and focus on ebooks alone. A product manager is something like a practical futurist, someone who can think nine months into the future and see a product through from inception to launch. I would be able to dream big and make long-range improvements.
I was refreshed and revitalized, ready for a new chapter of my life at Amazon. I was on a plane every week as Amazon’s first technology evangelist. I would meet with publishers in their midtown Manhattan offices to explore new ebook ideas together. Then I’d be off to India or the Philippines to see how conversion houses were making ebooks and to tell them some of what I’d learned during my time at Amazon, feeding them bits of information that would make them work better and faster and cheaper for us. I was doing my small part with each player in this ebook ecosystem to move it forward and to find ways that publishers could spend less and convert more, so readers could have more ebooks to enjoy.
I saw colossal, warehouse-sized machines that stripped books of their spines in seconds, like wood chippers for books, but that were as precise as a doctor’s scalpel. At a technology park in India, I also saw an experimental array of quarter-million-dollar machines that were like animatronic spiders. They were used for nondestructive scanning, the high-end way to digitize content—unlike the cheaper method of hacking pages with machetes. The machine lifted a book and carefully turned its pages one by one so they could be photographed and digitized. Those animatronic spiders were so delicate that I would have trusted them to hold a baby and change its diaper.
Being an evangelist gave me a chance to engage with publishers worldwide, and I got to see the scramble firsthand as publishers adjusted to digital books. Some publishers reacted better than others; some, in fact, were downright revolutionary.
Ultimately, I think everyone who worked in those early years of ebooks was changed by the experience. We weren’t working just for paychecks. We were learning and growing. We changed from one month to the next, sort of like taking a paintbrush and a bucket of water and drawing your self-portrait on a hot sidewalk. You’d maybe be able to sketch half of your face before the water you’d already painted would start to fade and evaporate, so you’d never quite be finished.
We’re all sidewalk portraits painted with water on a hot summer’s afternoon. And there’s a holy fervor and zeal than you can see in the eyes of the ebook revolutionaries who are working as insiders, whether they work at the publishers or the retailers or as independent software vendors and sideline pundits. It would be one thing perhaps if we were merely part of the MP3 or digital video
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