No Book Will Be an Island

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability â...

 Creating a "Seed" of Civilization's Knowledge

I’ve been thinking of civilization (the technium) as a life form, as a self-replicating structure. I began to wonder what is the smallest seed into which you could reduce the "genes" of civilization, and have it unfold again, sufficient that it could also make another seed again. That is, what is the smallest seed of the technium that is viable? It must be a seed able to grow to reproduction age and express itself as a full-fledge civilization and have offspring itself -- another replicatin...