What Will Happen to Books?

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present.

“For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.” The closest humans have gotten to creating this seemingly impossible universal library was the great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., which was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. The library held half a million scrolls, which is estimated to be about 30 to 70 percent of all books in existence then. But the goal of curating a collection of all text has been quite out of reach.

That is until Google came along.

In 2004, Google announced that it will begin scanning the collection of five major research libraries to make the books searchable. And it was then that the idea of completing a universal library was in arms reach. With the power of technology and the Internet, we can create a “truly democratic [library], offering every book to every person.”

But the universal library is not limited to only books. Access to this enormous library is made relatively easy. With digital technology, the contents of millions of books, songs, movies, paintings, videos, essays, images, and billions of public web pages can be reached by any device with a screen.

Although the process of creating a digital universal library is seemingly inevitable, “Will we give up the highly evolved technology of ink on paper and instead read on cumbersome machines”? The answer is a no — for now. Publishers have lost millions from the long awaited “e-Book revolution” that never happened. On the other hand, the number of physical copies sold in the world continues to grow each year. But an essential part of transitioning from paper to plastic is turning ink into images.

Music streaming services have pioneered the given ability to let users and “experts” curate music into various albums, or “playlist”. The music audience selects specific songs that match certain genres or criteria and collects recorded songs into new albums. Just as this is done with music, the universal library will “encourage” users to create digital “bookshelves”. These collections will have special interests or “genres” that can expedite research processes.

Sure, the process of digitizing all published work may seem like a daunting task. But the stagnant physical copy is no match to the ever evolving digital technology. The potential of Google’s “Search” has opened up new realms of creativity. It has inspired growth and research. It has made the Internet from nothing into everything. And the screen acts as a portal for information to travel instantaneously from source to user. Billions will be able to access isolated books in the not-so-distant future from the “universal library of all human knowledge”.

All new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story.