In the Pay Library of the (near) Future, you’ll be able to purchase or rent a book from any publisher as easily as you can get money from any bank’s ATM today (even if you’re overseas — systems in different countries will interact with each other). Some publishers, and some readers, will prefer this distribution channel to downloading. They’ll carry their library in their wallet with their credit cards.
If you have ideas about what the Library of the Future will be like, please submit them. Photos must be yours or be authorized by the photographer, whom we’ll happily identify. You can reach me directly at first initial lastname at gmail.
In the Pay Library of the (near) Future, 5
In the Pay Library of the (near) Future, you’ll be able to purchase or rent a book from any publisher as easily as you can get money from any bank’s ATM today.
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The Library of the Future will allow you to set up your own Book-Of-The-Week (or Month, or Day) Club; you will be able to say: ’email me a book like this one every week until I ask you to stop’. You can choose the criteria yourself (All the PG Wodehouse books, in chronological order) or let the system do it for you (books like ‘The Man in Lower Ten’). With’fuzzy’ criteria like this, your own system will then feed back to the library whether you actually read that week’s book, so it can modify its decision rules for next time.
In fact your own computer/PDA/reading device system will be an integral part of the LOTF. It will keep track of what you read and when, who you shared it with, what you thought of it and where to find it again if necessary. It will also have ‘rules’ for dealing with incoming and finished books, rather like the message rules that currently exist for incoming and outgoing email.
Jon —
What stimulates me most about your idea is how it recognizes that we have a computer as part of this system, and that it can be integrated into the process of identifying useful books for us.
I’ll see if we can promote this “comment” into a full-fledged post of its own.
Update: Jon’s comment above, and an expanded, more rounded vision, can be found as Library of the Future, 6 here at Teleread.
I think that the free public libraries in this country should stay open and not be overpassed by technology. Physical libraries should not be disgaurded or put aside. A library is a quite place where you can get expert help in your research and studies. Learning everything from the internet is not a safe or logical idea. (You can’t always trust your sources on the internet.) If someday the idea of the paper book really does become a thing of the past, I still think that we should have physical libraries were people can log on to read books. If that day does dawn I myself would hope for a new birth in library museums, where you can actually still read the first edition of a reference book, and know for a fact that it is the real book, not edited, and not taken from different editions. I myself have a love of old books. We would miss out on a lot if we did not save the classics. I’m certain that eventually most books will be published widely without paper, but I myself am afraid that some good resources will be left out of the digital shuffle.