Electronic publishing is replacing print, changing reading as well as society.
Cavemen used charcoal to write on walls. Ancient Egyptians scrawled hieroglyphics on papyrus scrolls. Medieval monks penned illuminated manuscripts on parchment. Then Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with movable type, making writing available to all.
Now a revolution is under way that is rapidly making ink on paper obsolete. Books as we know them are dead, many experts say.
But questions go unanswered as technology advances. How can we preserve the world’s knowledge in rapidly evolving electronic formats? How can copyrights be protected when books can be duplicated in the blink of an eye?
What will we bring to the beach to read on a summer afternoon?
Volumes of mashed wood pulp, bound in animal hides and stored on a shelf, will soon be obsolete.
So what’s going to replace them?
Teeny, tiny little devices that will fit on your key chain and have enough storage to hold electronic versions of every book in the Library of Congress, according to the founder of Project Gutenberg, which seeks to put every book in the public domain online so people can download free.
“I just bought a $13 RAM stick at Target that holds 1 gigabyte of information,” said Michael Hart, founder of the nonprofit Project Gutenberg. “You could put 200 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare or a couple thousand ordinary books on there. Every book you ever read in your life.”
Hart, an avid reader, began his life’s work in 1971. In those days, people thought the idea was crazy.
“By 2021, I predict, you will be able to buy the same RAM stick with 32 terabytes,” Hart said. “That means every word in every major library in the world – you could carry them all around your neck or on your key chain.”
In 1988, when only 250,000 people could access the Internet, Hart created a sensation when he and volunteers successfully put “Alice in Wonderland” online.
“That was the breakthrough,” Hart said. “Kids dragged their parents to the computer to read it. People were sending me e-mails and stopping me on the street. That was when I realized we had made it. It was going to work.”
Extract taken from;
Word for word by Marla Jo Fisher
The Orange County Register, 18-February 2007