Other changes in form and content will be subtle, and they’ll develop slowly. As more readers come to discover books through online text searches, for example, authors will face growing pressures to tailor their words to search engines, the way bloggers and other Web writers routinely do today. Steven Johnson sketches out some of the likely consequences: “Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs
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