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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.

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.”

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.

The basic code at the heart of the new internet is pretty simple. The new generation of internet filters looks at the things you seem to like – the actual things you've done, or the things people like you like – and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you'll do and want next.

you're the only person in your bubble

the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.

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.