Essay

You have just written your 301-page autobiography. Please give us page 218.

CHAPTER 12
“THE NOVEL RENAISSANCE”

Nothing seemed to go right in January 2040. “Writers Ink”, my online-only publishing house had just completed 15 years of publishing and selling e-books online. As its founder-CEO I was proud of its accomplishments. We had established the user-friendly “netStore”, where one needed only to point and click to purchase an e-Book, and our minimal operational costs led to greater royalties for authors, who were increasingly drawn to our low-cost, high-reward publishing services. It was a win-win proposition – at least until the viral “Writers Stink” campaign. Through social-networking sites, people alleged that we were destroying the traditional book with our lower prices, and without regard for the aesthetic value of a paper-based novel. They stoked the flames of the e-book controversy and magnified it to such an extent that we ran up our first loss since gestation. The company, once an innovative tech start-up, had become a victim of negative public opinion. Survival would require a quick and drastic change.

Our public relations agency advised a swift and persuasive counter campaign. We instead poured our resources into discovering why our e-books were despised. As it turned out, readers found the conventional book far more comfortable to hold. To them, our customers, books were meant to be simple, portable, easy to lend… Books were certainly not mere text to be sold cheaply and pasted onto the white glare of an LCD monitor. This insight gave birth of the technological sensation that changed the publishing world for good.

In true Silicon Valley style, Writers Ink acquired a start-up that marketed e-paper that could change the contents of its display instantly. However, unlike the primitive screens used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader devices early on in the century, this e-paper was just 0.10mm thick, had a paper-like texture, could be folded over, and displayed high-resolution color images. Our research labs quickly discovered a way of binding together sheets of this material and embedding the common “wrist-strap PC” of the 2030’s into the spine. In exactly five months, they created the Dynamic novel – the “DyNo”. It was wirelessly linked to the “netStore”, it changed between displayed books in under a second, and it could be mass-produced and sold efficiently for $99. To cap it off, no one could immediately tell the difference between a DyNo and a traditional book!

The world adored the DyNo. It was no larger than a pocketbook, but displayed even the largest of tomes without losing the ‘book format’. Its sheer demand across the globe put Writers Ink at the top of the Forbes list. Libraries and large institutions ordered entire bookshelves of DyNos, and worldwide reading statistics soared to record levels. If it was technological innovation that started the company in 2025, it was further technological innovation that saved it and spurred it on to reserve a place in the e-pages of history.

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