“Screw the independent bookstores,” he told me. “There weren’t any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand.”

This article is a good piece on the narcissism which is Silicon Valley, but this line stuck with me.

Growing up, I hated the very few local bookstores, since they sucked, and mostly sold textbooks. The one quarter way decent local library sold off all its real books and converted to a learning English center.

Until Amazon came around, other English speaking bookstores around the world wouldn’t ship to Pakistan. I think I was one of Amazon’s earliest customers, since it was the only bookstore in the US awesome enough to ship to Pakistan.

In the rich world, people go in rhapsodies over bookshops and libraries, but they forget how elitist they are. The rich world spends far far more money on how to restrict access to books to the non-rich world they they do on providing access to books.

So while Silicon Valley might be narcissistic, it is the only game in town when it comes to disseminating knowledge worldwide. Whither it be the most capitalistic beast around today, Amazon, or its polar oppostite Wikipedia, them in Silicon Valley seem to be the only people dreaming big today.