Reading in an Age of Change essay

In a New York Times op-ed piece in October 2009, Google founder Sergei Brin outlined the reasons for the Google Books project. It was, he argued, a project designed to ‘unlock the wisdom held in an enormous number of out-of-print books’.¹ In a similar vein, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a clearly stated intent for the Kindle: to make available the world’s entire library of books anywhere, any time.² They share the vision of a heavenly library, an online repository of the world’s books. And they are not alone. To anyone who has grown up with the joys of the internet, it’s only natural to imagine that books would join the vast repository of information currently available online. Indeed, it’s tempting to suggest that such a heavenly library is inevitable, that within our lifetimes all of bookdom will be at our fingertips, a simple click or touch away.