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the heaviest buyers of e-books are now buying more, not fewer, printed books

Clay Shirky

Not once in that half century has anyone successfully invented anything that feels like the digital version of a book. Books online, whether in a Kindle or Google Books, are always (cue McLuhan) the old medium populating the new.

Carr's concern about the impact of the Internet on the way we think isn't misplaced. Small's research and other studies make it clear that the information explosion and the tools we employ to contain it affect cognition. But it will take time before it's clear whether we should mourn the old ways, celebrate the new, or learn to stop worrying and love the Net.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The 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.

once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.

Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

we may be entering an era in history in which we will store fewer and fewer memories inside our own brains.

external storage and biological memory are not the same thing

I think Carr’s premises are correct:  the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought.

there are a host of people, from mathematicians to jazz musicians, who practice kinds of deep thought that are perfectly distinguishable from deep reading.

in either the availability or comprehension of material on scientific or technical subjects

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

Of course, it's probably not an either/or proposition. I want both: I want my organic brain to contain vast stores of knowledge and my silicon overmind to contain a stupidly huge amount more.

by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely "human" tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming

Si seuls Google et Amazon arrivent donc aujourd’hui à faire pointer directement, à partir d’une url, un fragment qui aura circulé sur le web (site, réseaux sociaux, etc.) vers sa position exacte dans le texte auquel il renvoie, c’est (en partie) parce que ces plateformes sont fermées et imposent une vision figée du texte.