part 2

Books, their size, covers, typeface have a character to me, convey something of their content.  I am sure someone several millenia ago, someone "old" when told about this new way to communicate, by scratching on wet clay.  Complained that the immediacy, the intensity, of listening to a recitation by a speaker was going to be lost, and that was a big loss.  I imagine there was another complaint that the craftsmanship and artistry of the individual scribe which made each hand coped book a work of individual art was being lost when books could be printed on a press.  And now here I am looking at the library I have accumulated over a lifetime and realizing the information it holds is available to be stored in any number of hand held devices.  Some can speak the words to me. Some will allow me to scan and skip anywhere in the text I choose.  It is wonderful for all of us.  The cheaper and broader the dsissemination of information the greater the opportunity we have to interact positivly with each other and the world we live in. The greater the opportunity we have to learn how alike we are as human beings.  Yup I will keep my books, I think there is nothing wrong with nostalgia. But I am downloading works from my local library to read on my laptop and play on my iPod.  I cancled my NY Times daily delivery and read the paper online.  I even blog.

what I realized when I moved

When I moved a week ago, I took as much of my personal library as  could.  I took 6 bookcases and tried to take only as many books as the 6 could hold.  A few days after I moved in amazon announced they are giving free software so your iPod or iPhone can share a kindle file.  I looked at my wall of books and realized they will shortly be oldfashoined, and soon after that antiques. Knowledge dissemination is undergoing another major shift.  Maybe 5 thousand years ago knowledge was transmitted by word of mouth.  Accurate transmission was as reliable as the old children's game of telephone.   Somewhere after that a written language, first on wet clay, than on papyrus, than on rolled animal skin, allowed one person to communicate the exact same message to someone too far away to hear a voice and even those who were not born until after the speaker had died. This process was far less labor intensive than word of mouth communication, but did require a one to one effort between the writer or copier and a single copy of the information. A bit more than 5 centuries ago,  the invention of the printing press allowed a crew of only a few to reproduce multiple copies of information quickly and aqccurately.  Now an individual can be in almost any urban and many non-urban areas around the world and have access to a vast common pool of information, news, books, video while standing on a street corner or walking across a grassy field.