Free Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading by Jason Merkoski

revolution or part of TV in its early test-pattern era. But (and you know this already) there’s something sacred about books. They’re humanity’s lifeblood, these inky words and smudges that make their way into our minds. Ultimately, books are a small but essential part of the human condition. They are tapestries of birdsong, magic, and intrigue, in equal parts.
    As an evangelist, I was interacting with publishers and ebook revolutionaries outside of Amazon. I was moving the ebook revolution forward by improving ebook content. I was venturing beyond Amazon’s walled garden to plant seeds like a Johnny Appleseed for ebooks, never quite certain how these seeds would grow but certain they needed to be planted. And then those seeds would grow and bear fruit that would find its way back to Amazon and to the Kindles and ebooks I loved. This new role was a first for me and for Amazon, with its highly secretive culture. For Amazon, this move was revolutionary.

Bookmark: Burning Books
    On July 12, 1562, Diego de Landa, the Bishop of Yucatan, started a horrific bonfire. Hundreds of Mayan scrolls were tossed into the fire, as well as thousands of sacred images. Diego de Landa believed himself to be in the moral right, having found what he called “superstition and lies of the devil” in the books. He had gained the trust of the Mayans, gained access to their sacred books, but then with the might of the Spanish conquistadors behind him, he burned them all. Only three full scrolls of the formerly vast Mayan empire remain now, plus charred portions of a fourth.
    The Nazis too are known to have burned books. Jewish and “degenerate” books—including volumes by Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway—were raided from libraries by Nazi youths and consigned to flames. At least 18,000 distinct titles were identified as officially objectionable, and untold hundreds of thousands of copies were burned in well-attended public events.
    Book burning has historically been a tool used by tyrants in authority to penalize or marginalize detractors. Do you think America was more enlightened? Not really. Even though we value free speech in America, we have at times taken a tyrannical approach. During the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, it was decided that “material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc.” would be removed from libraries and burned. In fact, this was enacted by presidential decree.
    It’s harder to burn ebooks.
    Burning an e-reader will cause you to choke from the fumes, so don’t do it. And while digital book burning won’t happen, a more subtle version might arise. The handful of retailers who control the distribution of digital books could choose not to make one or more books available for any number of reasons.
    Consider the time, shortly before the iPad launched in 2010, when Amazon decided to yank the “buy buttons” from books and ebooks published by Macmillan, one of the top U.S. publishers, to protest new pricing terms Macmillan wanted. Amazon removed tens of thousands of books in all.
    It was one of the brazen moves Amazon sometimes makes. Pulling the “buy button” from items in the store means that it’s not possible to click on any button to actually order a given book shown on the Amazon web page. You can see the book—it’s tantalizingly close—but you can’t buy it. As long as the buy buttons are gone, orders can’t be placed.
    It’s a money-losing proposition for Amazon and any business partner it decides to yank the buy buttons from, but contractually, it’s something Amazon is allowed to do. But why would the online retailer want to do that? It’s like Amazon is shooting itself in the foot. Perhaps Amazon had previously shot itself in the foot so many times that it thought it had bulletproof shoes. Or enough scar tissue not to mind.
    Yanking the buy button is a punitive gesture that Amazon has been known to pull with publishers, like a tyrannical Byzantine emperor