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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.

Isidore, the bishop of Seville, remarked how reading “the sayings” of thinkers in books “render[ed] their escape from memory less easy.”

Shakespeare has Hamlet call his memory “the book and volume of my brain.”

Books provide a supplement to memory, but they also, as Eco puts it, “challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.”

On va aussi à la bibliothèque pour y retrouver dans le calme des documents que les autres médias détruisent ou noient dans le renouvellement insatiable de leur production ou on utilise les services d’un bibliothécaire ou d’un documentaliste pour retrouver les informations utiles perdues dans le chaos général.

si l'iPad depuis son lancement en avril 2011 a généré « un battage médiatique », ses utilisateurs ne l'utilisent pas pour lire des livres - mais plutôt pour du jeu et d'autres activités

« Le rapport constate que les propriétaires de tablettes ne constituent pas la majorité des utilisateurs d'ebooks, puisque 45 % des répondants citent leur PC ou leur Mac de même que leur lecteur à encre électronique. »

En 2010, l'expansion est incontestable, avec non seulement une fidélisation des lecteurs, qui n'étaient auparavant que des acheteurs occasionnels, mais qui plus est, un regain d'intérêt pour les livres imprimés également, chez les consommateurs d'ebooks.

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