Twenty-five years into a digital century, and the e-books are dismal.

We can do better — as publishers, booksellers, and readers alike — and we ought to try. This zine is an argument and a model, and we’ll take things in that order.

Physical books — hereafter, “books” — are useful machines refined over many centuries. My argument is that e-books must, at minimum, meet the standard they set. So, to begin, here is

The Standard

E-books must match the speed, privacy, and reliability of the printed page.

The book loads instantly! It is perfectly responsive in your grip, operating at precisely the speed of your thought and curiosity. The book never, ever makes you wait.

Human life is now surveilled from every angle: state, corporation, doorbell. One space that remains totally private is the one inside your head. Because of the way text works in the mind, the book — distinct from other media — has always defended and enriched this space.

Together, these properties suggest a deep reliability: book as capable, trustworthy ally. The counterexample is digital media. A licensing deal expires, so a title vanishes; a website goes under, so a link breaks; a company is acquired, so your entire digital comic book collection is rendered unreadable. (This is real! It happened to me!)

E-books must permit sharing, including resale.

The power of a book is that you can truly own it. The joy of a book is that you can give it away.

This seems bad for publishers, who would rather sell two books than one … but no publisher actually feels bad about it. All understand that this gesture — “You have to read this! It’s so good” — is the piston that makes publishing go round.

Note the eloquence of the physical: a book departs one collection as it enters another. E-books must permit sharing, but we’d like that sharing to work the way it does for a physical book, not a pirated movie. More on this later.

E-books must support, rather than erode, the vitality of bookstores.

A person visits a bookstore not primarily because they need a book, but because they are the kind of person who visits a bookstore. In its robust physical reality — in the presentation of so many books on so many shelves; in their curation and juxtaposition — the bookstore explains what this enterprise is all about.

The bookstore does not only serve readers: it recruits and cultivates them. Some e-book platforms (such as Bookshop.org, which I like) channel a portion of their proceeds towards bookstores. This is good, but it doesn’t address our core demand, because dollars are no substitute, in the end, for visitors.

I dream of e-books that actually bring people into bookstores. A contradiction?

No, just a challenge.

The Anti-Model

We are NOT going to make an app!

No bespoke app will be available and operable in twenty years — it is absolutely inconceivable. The quest to match the reliability of the book is already plenty daunting; we won’t doom ourselves from the start.

Likewise, for the sake of speed and privacy, we will require no user accounts, offer no virtual shelves. The book, our lodestar, sends no confirmation email, collects no tracking data. Here is the book’s “login” process: pick it up.

No app. No users. What’s left?

The Model

It’s so simple, it’s barely anything at all:

We give every copy of our book a tether to a uniquely-identified e-book. Right now, a QR code is the best way to do this. NFC tags are also promising, but, for now, we’ll go with the code.

(Here, in the printed version, there’s a QR code that connects to this very e-book.)

There are several details and decisions that make this e-book noteworthy.

This e-book is uniquely identified, and each copy of this zine links to just one. Let’s pause to appreciate that this is only recently possible. The business logic of books was, for approximately ever, built around rigid reproduction: not a comma out of place. But printing technology has come a long way! It is now possible to produce a long run of books (or zines) with variations large and small, at very high quality, economically.

This e-book is a web page, accessible at a URL. In our attempt to match the reliability of the book, we use the most ubiquitous formats available. We do so knowing we’ll probably still fail. We resolve to try our best.

This e-book has its own distinct presentation, designed with care. We don’t cede this terrain to the e-reader app, offering a pile of text to be reformatted freely. We do understand this puts the onus on us to provide an e-book that is flexible and accessible.

This e-book does not track its reader, but it does account for its own use, and imposes limits that simulate the productive properties of the physical book.

The e-book associated with this zine — this very one you’re reading right now — can be accessed 100 times, which is a number that floats between scales: more than you’ll ever need, even if you circulate the zine among friends, but not enough to support internet distribution. (You’ll find the remaining number of reads at the end of the text.)

The e-book also notes where in the world it’s being accessed, and it can only “travel” at 1,000 mph or less. Two or more readers accessing the e-book from distant locations will lock each other out. (An echo, here, of William Gibson’s theory of jetlag: “Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”)

Wait. Isn’t it absurd to impose these physical limitations on digital media?

For a long time, I thought so … and I now believe I was wrong. There’s nothing virtuous or natural about the behaviors of computer systems. Engineers have toiled across decades to mold those behaviors. Everything is a choice.

The limitations of the physical are productive and fun: so why not simulate them, just as eagerly as video game programmers simulate glinting reflections, leaping plumbers? We are here to make something we like — maybe something we love — something that works.

Now: if the physical book is the avatar of the e-book, it means you buy e-books at the same place you buy physical books. You buy them at the bookstore.

I should say: the physical book can be the avatar of the e-book … and other physical objects can fill that role, too. A publisher might offer e-books accessed through letterpress cards, strange amulets, action figures — anything that can carry a QR code or an NFC tag. And where do you buy those things? Same as before: the bookstore. (I get excited thinking about new kinds of sections … insane magazine racks …)

Free Readers

This model produces e-books that are much more liberal — permit many more readers — than the e-books offered by digital platforms today. Culturally, that’s welcome; commercially, it’s sustainable. Sharing is no threat when it’s buffered by productive frictions.

Friction doesn’t always suffice. You might already have conjured the figure of the e-book thief, walking the shelves, snapping QR codes left and right. For this reason, retail books will probably require an activation step at checkout.

But, don’t get too caught up in adversarial spy games, because the reality is, if media can be displayed on a screen, it can be copied and circulated. Sane limits guide readers of good will towards sustainable behavior, so our overriding goal is: the defense and enlargement of that good will.

These days, every vector of commercial force points towards the subscription model, because it provides such a powerful tether of control. These days, I had to create a user account to drive my car!? From the point of view of a media corporation or a digital platform, my model for e-books is risky — misguided — indefensible in fiduciary terms — because it surrenders too much “value”.

And to whom is that value surrendered? The reader, of course, who is also an owner, possibly a customer — and no longer a user. We’ve become accustomed to that role, but it’s not mandatory, never was: it’s possible to cavort across the internet, do all sorts of interesting things, without ever becoming one.

So, we’ll go on ahead, without the corporations and the platforms, because we revere the sovereignty of the book, and we would like to see it reflected — even imperfectly — in the digital realm. Twenty-five years into a digital century, and we can do so much better.

That’s my argument, and this is my model: for an e-book that aspires to the speed, privacy, and reliability of the printed page; that can be shared or resold; that opens up interesting new possibilities for bookstores.

Now, go ahead: scan the QR code and visit this zine’s e-book version. (You already did this!) Pass it around. Test the limits; find the friction. Festina lente!

Robin Sloan, September 2025