Nook Launch, Apple Tablet Augur Writers' Revolution

To celebrate the launch of the Nook, its new e-book reader, Barnes & Noble is giving away a free copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point to the first 10,000 people who buy the $259 device when it is released late next month.

Right gesture, wrong book.

The truth is that we are now way beyond the tipping point of the electronic book story. And it’s not just the Nook that has tipped the scales from the analog to the digital.

Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)’s Kindle, of course, has pioneered both the technology and the business. And now new products from Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE), Plastic Logic, IRex, and Spring Design are making the e-book revolution the most significant techno-cultural upheaval since the introduction of the iPod.

And this is all happening before the imminent release of Apple’s touch tablet -- a potentially game-changing event, which was inadvertently confirmed yesterday by New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller.

But with or without the “iTablet,” the point of no return was reached months ago. E-books are already dramatically changing the way books are published, sold, and read. And now they are about to revolutionize the act of writing a book.

Yes, you read it right: E-books are about to fundamentally change the traditional craft of writing.

Last week, at a telephone press conference to launch the Nook, I asked William Lynch, Barnes & Noble’s president, how he thought the company’s new electronic device would change the way in which writers go about writing books.

Lynch paused for thought. It will open up many new possibilities for writers, he finally said, weighing his words carefully. Most significantly, he noted, it will give the writer the opportunity to present multiple plots to the same book.

Unlike the e-book story, then (which, in my view, will inevitably end with the replacement of analog by digital text), every electronic book can come with a series of alternative endings.

So in the upcoming murder mystery story, Who Killed the Paper Book, the identity of the murderer will depend on which version you happen to click on. In one edition, it will be Steve Jobs, in another Jeff Bezos, in a third it might even be William Lynch.

Lynch might be right. But even more than his multiple endings, the e-book is going to change the way in which writers go about their craft. For me, the most exciting change lies in bringing books alive by replacing analog footnotes with digital links.

While not all current e-readers have Web access (the Kindle currently does, while the Nook doesn’t), the hypertext e-book is now inevitable. And, in my view, writing hypertextually offers the book author an immensely richer intellectual palate for self-expression, as well as an exceptionally efficient technology for verifying sources and ideas.

Ironically, however, it’s Steve Jobs, the guy who famously believes that “people don’t read anymore,” who will most radically change the life of the writer.

The iPhone, of course, already effectively competes with the Kindle in the e-book marketplace. But it is Apple’s imminent touch tablet which will most dramatically change the self-expressive craft of the traditional writer. This radical new Apple device will transform the act of reading into a tactile multimedia experience, thereby liberating the writer from complete reliance on text.

Daily Beast publisher Tina Brown believes that in the next three years we will enter the golden age of journalism. Likewise, I’m convinced that the e-book revolution represents a potentially new golden age for writers.

There are many economic, legal, and aesthetic problems, of course -- from digital piracy, to the ubiquity of free content, to the shrinking attention span of online “readers,” to Google’s destructively reductive snippet culture. But these problems pale when compared with the opportunities that the e-book offers the publisher, the reader, and, above all, the writer.

So if you love books, go out and buy an e-reader. It doesn’t really matter which one you get: The Nook, the Kindle, the Irex, the Sony Reader all have their own strengths and weaknesses. The point is to celebrate the e-book revolution. The story is set in stone now: E-readers have arrived in the e-promised land. Now all I've got to do is write my e-masterpiece.

— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, can be reached on Twitter at @ajkeen.