The Future of Books

Funny blog post about the future of books! Excerpt below:

2020: All Books Will Be
Cross-Platform and Interactive.

Future "books" will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They'll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps whenever someone in your locality purchases the same book as you— anything so you don't have to actually read the thing. Authors will do their own marketing, the reader will be responsible for distribution, the wisdom of crowds will take care of the editing, and the invisible hand of the market will perform the actual writing (if any). Writers will respond either by going viral or by going feral.

2030: All Books Will Be
Crowdsourced and Cloud-Based.

Novelists will start out designing their characters in the form of sets of vinyl figurines. If these generate enough buzz, fans will produce the actual novel collaboratively as a wiki. As you read it, thermal cameras will measure your physiological signals, including flickers in eye movement, facial muscle contractions, and heart rate, to determine where you want the story to go next—it will be expected to read itself to you, explain itself, and unobtrusively weave your incoming text messages into the dialogue. You will also be able to fine-tune details of how the characters are digitally rendered, fire at them, and (when imperative) indulge in cybersex with them. If a novelist is posthumously discovered, his or her vinyl figurines may wind up as collector's items.

2060: Physical Books Will Make a
Comeback in Annoying Contexts.

As printed matter gets harder to obtain, Antiquarian Archipelago will become a popular infotainment show, starring heavily-armed archivists who teleport from island to island in search of rare gems. Meanwhile new printed works will continue to be released—in the form of dust jackets made from edible fungi—as faux-antique treasures at Renaissance Fairs and related nostalgic historical reenactments. The last bibliophile will traverse the city in a daze, wondering where the bookstores went. Meanwhile all of human knowledge will be encrusted onto a chip and sent into outer space by sixth graders, as a ploy to get out of doing their homework.