Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. That includes all the yellowing newspapers, unused telephone books, dusty county files, and old ledgers now moldering in basements. More of the past will be linked to today, increasing understanding today and appreciation of the past.
Third, the universal networked library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts—past and present in all languages—on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do and don’t know. The empty white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.
Fourth and finally, the full, complete universal library of all works becomes more than just a better searchable library. It becomes a platform for cultural life, in some ways returning book knowledge to the core. Right now, if you mash up Google Maps and monster.com, you get maps of where jobs are located by salary. In the same way, it is easy to see that, in the great networked library, everything that has ever been written about, for example, Trafalgar Square in London could be visible while one stands in Trafalgar Square via a wearable screen like Google Glass. In the same way, every object, event, or location on earth would “know” everything that has ever been written about it in any book, in any language, at any time. From this deep structuring of knowledge comes a new culture of participation. You would be interacting—with your whole body—with the universal book.
Soon a book outside the universal Library of All will be like a web page outside the web, gasping for air. Indeed, the only way for the essence of books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library. Most new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story. The great continent of analog books in the public domain, and the 25 million orphan works (neither in print nor in the public domain), will eventually be scanned and connected. In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail.
One quirk of networked books is that they are never done, or rather that they become streams of words rather than monuments. Wikipedia is a stream of edits, as anyone who has tried to make a citation to it realizes. A book will be networked in time as well as space.
But why bother calling these things books? A networked book, by definition, has no center and is all edges. Might the unit of the universal library be the sentence, paragraph, or chapter article instead of a book? It might. But there is a power in the long form. A self-contained story, unified narrative, and closed argument has a strong attraction for us. There is a natural resonance that draws a network around it. We’ll unbundle books into their constituent bits and pieces and knit those into the web, but the higher-level organization of the book will be the focus for our attention—that remaining scarcity in our economy. A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Those stories will play across screens. Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the seatback of a plane. Earlier this evening I watched a movie on my phone. We will watch anywhere. Everywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places—like ATM machines and supermarket checkout lines. These ever present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.
The screen demands more than our eyes. The most physically active we get while reading a book is to flip the pages or dog-ear a corner. But screens engage our bodies. Touch screens respond to the ceaseless caress of our fingers. Sensors in game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii track our hands and arms. The controller for a video game screen rewards fast twitching. The newest screens—the ones we view within virtual reality headsets and goggles—elicit whole-body movements. They trigger interaction. Some of the newest screens (such as those on the Samsung Galaxy phone) can follow our eyes to perceive where we gaze. A screen will know what we are paying attention to and for how long. Smart software can now read our emotions as we read the screen and can alter what we see next in response to our emotions. Reading becomes almost athletic. Just as it seemed weird five centuries ago to see someone read silently (literacy was so rare most texts were read aloud for the benefit of all), in the future it will seem weird to watch a screen without some part of our body responding to the content.
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact uncovered while screening will provoke our reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screening encourages rapid pattern making, associating one idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. Screening nurtures thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, or we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, or we read the owner’s manual of a gadget before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do. Screens are instruments of the now.
Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too. Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click, making it easier to eliminate a falsehood than to post a falsehood in the first place. In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own myths from pieces. On networked screens everything is linked to everything else. The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given to it by critics but by the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the world. A person, artifact, or fact does not “exist” until it is linked.
A screen can reveal the inner nature of things. Waving the camera eye of a smartphone over a manufactured product can reveal its price, place of origin, ingredients, and even relevant comments by other owners. With the right app, like Google Translate, a phone’s screen can instantly translate the words on a menu or a sign in a foreign country into your home language, in the same font. Or another phone app can augment a stuffed children’s toy with additional behaviors and interactions that show up only on the screen. It is as if the screen displays the object’s intangible essence.
As portable screens become more powerful, lighter, and larger, they will be used to view more of this inner world. Hold an electronic tablet up as you walk along a street—or wear a pair of magic spectacles or contact lenses—and it will show you an annotated overlay of the real street ahead: where the clean restrooms are, which stores sell your favorite items, where your friends are hanging out. Computer chips are becoming so small, and screens so thin and cheap, that in the next 30 years semitransparent eyeglasses will apply an informational layer to reality. If you pick up an object while peering through these spectacles, the object’s (or place’s) essential information will appear in overlay text. In this way screens will enable us to “read” everything, not just text.