Introducing exobooks

Imagine a bookshelf with a row of small tablet computers like the $50 Kindle Fire. On the outward-facing spines they have titles like “Oetzi the Iceman”, “Joyce’s Ulysses”, and “Star Wars”.

When you open one, it offers you a completely re-imagined Internet from the point of view of that topic: Oetzi’s version of Wikipedia will be full of Ice Age lore about healing plants, his Instagram will have imaginary pix of his friends and family and the places he’s been. His Wiktionary should take a stab at reconstructing the language he might have spoken.

The Ulysses exobook should offer a Wikipedia specializing in 1904 Dublin and the characters in Joyce’s novel, and omitting more recent knowledge. The Google Maps must be antedated to the world of 1904. The Google Books should only know of books published before 1904, and the YouTube of songs before that date.

A Star Wars exobook might try to integrate all the movies and novels and comics and fan fiction, with a Star Wars Wikipedia and a catalog of all the merchandise you can order.

To be practical, you’d probably want to be able to toggle the normal modern Earth perspective off and on, to research the creators and critics in our version of reality. Even here though you’d want your searches to narrow automatically to just information relevant to the topic area.

And this implies a very longterm commitment by Wikipedians and Googlists, etc, to filling in all the historical gaps so that eventually we can just press a button and create a custom exobook of (eg) your great great grandparents.

(Coincidentally, here’s a jukebox that lets you pick a decade and a country: http://radiooooo.com/ )