The History of Books and the Future of eBooks

It’s easy to love books, with their beautifully designed covers, tactile pages, and musty scent of ink. You might even track down a specific edition of a paper book, just because you like its cover better or want a copy of the first printing of a favorite volume.

eBooks, not so much. We love ebooks for specific things. We buy them on an impulse and read them moments later, adjust the font size to fit our eyesight, search for any word in the book, and get a list of highlights when done. We love the features, not the eBooks themselves. Rare indeed would be the person who tried to track down the first edition of an eBook. Now that eBooks are often not even cheaper than the print edition, it’s easy to wonder if it doesn’t just make more sense to go back to print.

Which got me wondering: How did books end up this way, and what if eBooks could be better? That turned into a history of the book and its metamorphosis into an eBook, and how the latter paved the way for today’s AI revolution.

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