Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (17 page)

We were all rebels and outlaws at Amazon. It was gold-rush territory.

I suppose that’s only fitting, given Amazon’s roots in the Pacific Northwest, the Wild West Northwest. Back in the 1890s, there were towns in the Northwest—they might be lumber towns or mining towns—that would sometimes succeed. There’d be a boom in mining or logging, and people would flood in from all over the country and the world. All of a sudden, instead of just ten dusty prospectors on the streets after the saloon closed for the night, there’d be lawyers and accountants and, yes, prostitutes, all looking to capitalize on rumors they’d heard of untold riches.

Seattle was once the gateway to gold-rush territory, and that still shows as you drive through the old-timey downtown streets. You can see signs on brick buildings that were meant for prospectors a hundred years ago, signs for stores where they could provision themselves with sleeping sacks and hard-tack and pemmican and gold pans before they headed into the Yukon. But now there’s a new gold rush in town, the gold rush of ebooks.

This gold rush is heading farther afield than the Yukon. The move is on to make ebooks work for non-Western languages, and it won’t be long before you see Chinese and Japanese content look really good on e-readers. Current e-readers were designed for an English-speaking audience, so there’s work to do to make the experience great in other languages. That’s why Apple and Amazon and all the others are setting up territorial outposts in other countries—in the Middle East and Latin America and Europe and Australia—all across the globe. Each of these companies is intent on establishing itself above the others as the premier player in ebooks and digital devices.

The great game is now on in corporate conference rooms all over Silicon Valley, and anyone with any stake in ebooks and digital content is planning its company’s international expansions. Sony was first, another first for them, when they launched their e-reader in England and Germany and other European countries a full year before Amazon. But Amazon started to catch up by launching a dedicated UK device, as well as a universal Kindle that could be used in nearly every country with a 3G network, even on cruise ships out at sea.

The drawback with the universal approach that both Sony and Amazon have taken is that the devices are still English-centric. All the menus and navigation items and user interfaces are in English, which limits the sales of such devices in other languages. Tablet devices are doing much better internationally because they don’t have hardware keyboards that need to be customized for each language.

We’re going international with ebooks and written content in the same word-for-word way that print books once did.

Printing the Bible bankrupted Gutenberg. His financiers repossessed the equipment, and with the collapse of his workshop and his numerous lawsuits and losses, his workers had no place to go but elsewhere in Europe. Within fifty years of the first printed book, there were printing presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, France, and England. There were printers flourishing in hundreds of different towns.

As the printers spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, they cross-pollinated and learned from one another, much like tech workers in Silicon Valley today. It’s not just the ambience of Silicon Valley—with its sunny climate and wineries and badminton courts—that makes it so successful. No, the tech workers go from one company to the other, like bees from one flower to another, rapidly cross-pollinating all of Silicon Valley with everyone’s ideas.

I see the same cross-pollination already happening with ebooks. I see the flux of executives from New York’s book-publishing world coming to Seattle and Silicon Valley. I see Apple people coming to Kindle, Kindle people coming to Sony, and Sony people spreading the idea-pollen further afield. It’s all incestuous and cross-fertilized, and now that ebooks have been launched, there are no more secrets. You’ll be seeing better and better products, and maybe they’ll be more humanistic too.

Wealthy readers in the sixteenth century refused on principle to read printed books. They scorned these books because they seemed to lack the humanistic touch of an actual scribe’s hand and thought that the printing was too mechanical compared to the natural way a scribe’s hand would vary as he wrote out every word. They didn’t like the regularity or precision of the printed book and found it less authentic. Though it was cheaper than a handwritten book, the printed book was scorned so much that printers deliberately introduced defects in the fonts and varied them to make the book seem more irregular and less perfectly typeset.

It was a smart innovation, and if a sixteenth-century MRI machine had existed, it would have shown them what we have now learned: that the subtle differences in script and style in a handwritten book are actually better for reading retention. That’s because the brain pauses more and the eyes dart around more frequently to disambiguate words, giving the brain more time as it labors over every word to retain its meaning.

And yet, as we know, hand-printed books didn’t last long. How many handwritten books do you have in your own library? None? I thought so. And how many traditional print books do you expect to see in the average household a generation from now? None? Exactly.

The shift in taste away from print to digital will mirror the shift from handwritten to print.

The ebook is the second wave in the original print revolution. And this second wave is larger than the original wave that Gutenberg ushered in. It’s a wave that has the ability to bring everything together, if it’s done well. As experiential products, ebooks are able to contain images and video and audio and games and social network conversations—something that print books can’t hope to accomplish.

Not only that, but this second wave in reading can also bring down cultural barriers, like language itself. In the ultimate imagining of ebooks, it will be possible for one book to be rendered into many languages automatically. Likewise, all the comments will be automatically translated into the same language, allowing you and someone in Egypt or Spain to converse as book lovers while reading the same book, without worrying about language barriers.

But we need good language-translation services first.

Globally, there are about 6,900 living languages and at least that many unique ways of seeing the world.

Languages are puzzle boxes. What we do when we speak expresses only a hundredth of what we actually think. We leap from idea to idea with barely a thought, but we only express one idea of the many we conceive. That’s what makes conversations so much fun, and books too. They are all about translating, interpreting, discovering, and creating meanings from these puzzle boxes.

The difference is that languages aren’t antiques, like dusty, inlaid Chinese boxes with sliding panels. They’re made fresh every minute with every new utterance and usage, and they have to be deciphered anew at every sentence. So much is unsaid in a sentence that it has to be puzzled out and reconstructed. The process can often go awry, maybe because the speaker was joking, or using puns or double entendres, or perhaps because the listener misinterpreted what he or she read or heard.

Given all that can go wrong in communicating a sentence, let alone an entire book, it’s a wonder that books are translated at all.

And in fact, no translation is perfect. Any skilled translator will perform a deep reading of the book and try to interpret it before rewriting it anew. Inevitably, though—and this is part of the charm of translations—different nuances are brought to bear on the final translation because each translator interprets the book differently. Each translator implicitly refracts the book’s meaning through the crystal of his or her own life.

Some translations are more widely read than the originals and have a greater cultural impact. For example, between 1604 and 1611, the original Bible was translated into the English common at the time of Shakespeare. Named the King James Bible, after the then-current king of England, it abounds with terms we still use—turns of phrase such as “a broken heart” or “a drop in the bucket” or even “bite the dust” —but these, of course, never appeared as such in the original Greek and Latin.

This version of the Bible influenced writers from John Milton to William Faulkner. The text of the King James Bible was carefully crafted word by word by a committee of unpaid but highly devoted scholars who worked on this as a “labor of love.” They were men who perhaps never “saw eye to eye” but who “went the extra mile” to phrase the Bible in simple, easygoing speech.

But we’re in a digital world now. Since 2009, more books have been self-published every year than published by traditional publishers. In 2011 alone, almost 150,000 new self-published books glutted the marketplace, according to Bowker, a U.S. book trade organization. This is far more books than can conceivably be translated by humans. We shouldn’t have to rely on translators, right? Perhaps we’re sophisticated enough now that this can be automated and done digitally.

Google, for example, already offers a way to translate a given ebook into the language of your choice. I wanted to see how accurate automatic book-translation could be, so as an experiment, I took a paragraph from this chapter and used Google’s translator service to render it into another language (say, Chinese) and then re-translate it back into English. For example, when I translated “Languages are puzzle boxes” into Chinese and back to English, I got “Languages are mystery boxes, old conundrum boxes.” To determine the success rate, I took the number of correct words and subtracted it from the total number of words, and then divided by two, since we’re translating twice.

I tested a few different languages this way. Scores ranged from 83 percent for German to 65 percent for Japanese and averaged around 75 percent fidelity to the original text. A cynic would argue that this only proves my writing is more German than Japanese. But I would interpret this to mean that, on average, three-quarters of a given book of similar complexity to my own could be translated reasonably well into any language.

What’s the threshold for automatic translation? Apple’s virtual assistant Siri seems to have a success rate of 86 percent, and people are still complaining, so clearly, we have a few more years to wait before automated ebook translation happens and we’re able to achieve the global vision of reading that I described above. Even though they’re offered as part of Google’s ebook reading experience, automatic translations just aren’t good enough yet. But soon, perhaps in the “twinkling of an eye,” automatic translations will be good enough to read—but never as good, I think, as those from a skilled human translator.

Of course, the great thing about the future is that we can’t predict it. Perhaps an ebook innovator like Google will build a new Tower of Babel, but in reverse, reconstructing it from its rubble across all cultures. It’s ironic that the new Tower of Babel might be raised from the squat, windowless concrete building that holds Google’s cloud. Google is well poised to do this with its translation software and expertise.

Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine that Google can rebuild the Tower of Babel from rubble, one captcha at a time? (
Captchas
are those forms you fill out on websites when you have to verify your identity. They usually have a smudged word or two for you to type in.) Most of the captchas you see on the internet are from Google. They’re how Google fixes conversion errors in their ebook content. Every time you verify yourself on a website, you’re helping Google to decipher one or two words in one of millions of their books.

As a technologist, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to automatically decipher any book fairly well. I think that is stunning, because it opens up a whole new set of authors for me to read! These are authors who aren’t commercially important enough for publishers to translate themselves but authors that I would like to read, nonetheless.