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.