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The future of books

On the eve of BookExpo America in Washington, The New York Times Magazine has run a cover story on the future of the book by Wired‘s Kevin Kelly. He begins with some familiar rhetoric about a new Library of Alexandria — a future online interface where any piece of narrative or art from all extant human history will be immediately accessible by anyone, anywhere. From there, he argues that Internet technology will forever change the way we experience books (and other artforms, incidentally), and will render the copyright system obsolete.

This very long piece is devoted to some very long-range forecasting, so it may be a while before Kelly’s arguments are revealed as prophetic or misguided. But he does make some thought-provoking points, one of the main ones being that searchability will change everything. “Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library,” Kelly writes. “The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”

Related links:
Click here for Kevin Kelly’s NYT Magazine article

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