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Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them.
Indeed, dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. The conventional vision of the book’s future assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on the shelves in your public library.
But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: In the universal library, no book will be an island. It’s all connected.
You can get a sense of what this might be like by visiting Wikipedia. Think of Wikipedia as one very large book—a single encyclopedia—which of course it is. Most of its 34 million pages are crammed with words underlined in blue, indicating those words are hyperlinked to concepts elsewhere in the encyclopedia. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives Wikipedia—and the web—its immense force.
Ideally, in such a complete library we should be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine, or journal. The universal library should also include a copy of every painting, photograph, film, and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts.
Today the universal library would fill your bedroom. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your phone.
The universal library and its “books” will be unlike any library or books we have known because, rather than read them, we will screen them.
The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. You are anonymously marking up the web, making it smarter, when you link or tag something.
Once a book has been integrated into the newly expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books.
Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature.
We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.
once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums or playlists, the universal networked library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves”—a
The ability to purchase, read, and manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will drive reference books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel guides) in the future.
what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things:
First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near zero audience they usually have now.
Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked.
Third, the universal networked library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority.
Fourth and finally, the full, complete universal library of all works becomes more than just a better searchable library. It becomes a platform for cultural life, in some ways returning book knowledge to the core.
In the same way, every object, event, or location on earth would “know” everything that has ever been written about it in any book, in any language, at any time.
A self-contained story, unified narrative, and closed argument has a strong attraction for us. There is a natural resonance that draws a network around it.
A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing,
The screen demands more than our eyes. The most physically active we get while reading a book is to flip the pages or dog-ear a corner. But screens engage our bodies.
screen will know what we are paying attention to and for how long. Smart software can now read our emotions as we read the screen and can alter what we see next in response to our emotions. Reading becomes almost athletic.
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking.
Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screening encourages rapid pattern making, associating one idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. Screening nurtures thinking in real time.
Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too.
A screen can reveal the inner nature of things. Waving the camera eye of a smartphone over a manufactured product can reveal its price, place of origin, ingredients, and even relevant comments by other owners.
Computer chips are becoming so small, and screens so thin and cheap, that in the next 30 years semitransparent eyeglasses will apply an informational layer to reality.
Very soon most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, will contain a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens will be the tool we use to interact with this ubiquitous cognification.
A few pioneers have begun lifelogging: recording every single detail, conversation, picture, and activity. A screen both records and displays this database of activities. The result of this constant self-tracking is an impeccable “memory” of their lives and an unexpectedly objective and quantifiable view of themselves, one that no book can provide.
In the near future we will never be far from a screen of some sort. Screens will be the first place we’ll look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be.
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages. You have no responsibility to clean, to repair, to store, to sort, to insure, to upgrade, to maintain.
Five deep technological trends accelerate this long-term move toward accessing and away from ownership.
The trend in the past 30 years has been to make better stuff using fewer materials.
That’s called dematerialization.
Digital technology accelerates dematerialization by hastening the migration from products to services. The liquid nature of services means they don’t have to be bound to materials.
The decreasing mass of steel in an automobile has already given way to lightweight silicon. An automobile today is really a computer on wheels.
As cars become more digital, they will tend to be swapped and shared and used in the same social way we swap digital media.
Products encourage ownership, but services discourage ownership because the kind of exclusivity, control, and responsibility that comes with ownership privileges are missing from services.
To access a service, a customer is often committing to it in a far stronger way than when he or she purchases an item.
The longer you are with the service, the better it gets to know you; and the better it knows you, the harder it is to leave and start over again.
Of course, in all these you still pay; the difference is the deeper relationship that services encourage and require between the customer and the provider.
Access is also a way to deliver new things in close to real time. Unless something runs in real time, it does not count. As convenient as taxis are, they are often not real time enough.
The Uber-like companies can promise this because, instead of owning a building full of employees, they own some software. All the work is outsourced and performed by freelancers (prosumers) ready to work.
Our appetite for the instant is insatiable. The cost of real-time engagement requires massive coordination and degrees of collaboration that were unthinkable a few years ago. Now that most people are equipped with a supercomputer in their pocket, entirely new economic forces are being unleashed.
Accessing is not very different from renting. In a rent relationship the renter enjoys many of the benefits of ownership, but without the need for an expensive capital purchase or upkeep.
In other words, the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing.
We are at the midpoint in a hundred-year scramble toward greater decentralization. The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication.
The consequence of moving away from centralized organization to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything—both tangible and intangible—must flow faster to keep the whole going together.
