for the first time ever this year, the American Library Association's annual conference had a gaming pavilion, showcasing efforts to reach a demographic — tweens, teens and 20-somethings — that's tough to pull into the library.

Then there's just the overall focus on puzzle-solving, Danforth noted. Unlike books, games often have multiple story lines, depending on decisions that gamers make along the way. In the overall scheme of things, deploying a warrior for one job and a wizard for another isn't that much different from a boss sending an engineer out for one task and a public relations professional for another.

•The number of Internet-capable computers soared 39% — from about 137,000 in 2002 to nearly 190,000 in 2006. Libraries in rural states in New England and the Midwest led the country in public computers per capita in 2006. The increase in Internet access is thanks in part to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched a national program in 1997 to bring the Internet to libraries, beginning with the South. By 2003, the foundation had spent $250 million on some 47,000 computers, as well as training and tech support, bringing almost every public library online, said Jill Nishi, deputy director of the foundation's U.S. Libraries initiative. "You should be able to walk into any library and find Internet service," she said. "It's free, unfettered access to information."

Free Internet access is particularly important for low-income people, said Ken Flamm, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the role of the Internet in public libraries. Only about a third of households with incomes below $25,000 have Internet access, according to federal data.

Another study compared surgeons who play video games to those who don't. Even after taking into account differences in age, years of medical training and the number of laparoscopic surgeries performed, researchers found an edge for gamer surgeons. "The single best predictor of their skills is how much they had played video games in the past and how much they played now," said Iowa State University psychologist Douglas Gentile. "Those were better predictors of surgical skills than years of training and number of surgeries performed," Gentile said. "So the first question you might ask your surgeon is how many of these [surgeries] have you done and the second question is, 'Are you a gamer?'"

For better or worse, said Mr. Newsom, we are now always on the record. Every significant and insignificant conversation is being recorded, and the videos are available on YouTube.

Because video was not possible before, the web was dominated by text. Now that video cameras and broadband are cheap, information that is better served by video is getting converted. As a result, YouTube is now the second largest search engine, and traffic is through the roof. And because kids like Ian's son are video natives, this is just the beginning.

Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up and learning about the world through YouTube. In the first half of the 20th century, people grew up reading books and newspapers. Then there was a generation that grew up on movies and television. The last shift was to the Internet. And now web video is creating yet another generation. Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense