הרהורים נוספים על עתיד הקריאה

If you look at most of the non-fiction books in my library, you’ll see they’re totally marked up, underlined, annotated and messy. It’s the way I attempt to cement in those most important points, and it helps me recall the good stuff in a book more easily.

• all of the most relevant, thought-provoking passages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own condensed version of just the best pieces
• all of my notes and reflections attached to those individual notes
• the ability to copy and paste all of those notes and highlights into Evernote which makes them searchable, editable, organizable, connectable and remixable
• the ability to access my book notes and highlights from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases.

We can try to put a protective layer of glass [over] the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text?