Essay on The Future of Books Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

2020: all books will be cross platform and interactive.

future books will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3 d graphics, and streaming video. Theyll 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 dont 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. 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 nextit 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 collectors items.

2040: authors will become like tamagotchi.

having determined that what readers want is a sense of connection, publishers will organize adopt an author promotions, repackaging writers along the lines of webkinz and other imaginary pets. Feeding your favorite authors by buying their books will make their online avatars grow less pale and grouchy. Book clubs will cultivate with their favorite writers the warm, fuzzy, organic bond a trainer develops with his or her pokémon, a process that will culminate in staged fights to the death between your author and the author sponsored by another book club.

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These fights will occur offline, since there will be one or two bookstores left and something has to happen there.

2050: analog reading will be digitally simulated.

as people spend more and more of time immersed in massively multi player role playing games, they will begin to crave some downtime. Virtual simulation worlds will start to include hideaway libraries you can lock yourself into.

There youll be able to climb into a virtual bath and lovingly turn the pages of a pixilated representation of one of those dog eared tomesreliant on old school linear narrative that by this time will have been made illegal in the real world. Perfectly reproduced will be the sensation of turning the pages, the crack of the spine, and even the occasional paper cut. By 2052, 95% of the activity of 73% of role players will take place in these hideaways, since theyll be the only place to escape the incessant building of community and connectivity that will by then be such an infuriating aspect of offline reality.

2060: physical books will make a

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 releasedin the form of dust jackets made from edible fungias 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. New brain computer interfaces will redefine narrative, as electrodes implanted in the neocortex induce stories to form, without the intervention of a third party, as sustained hallucinations.

Hence the readers of the future will spend most of their time in an epileptic fugue state. Artificial intelligences will use deep structure pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and information theory to ensure each new trance state is popular enough to get upvoted on the hottest content ranking platforms. Nanobots in our bloodstream will inform us how to behave, coordinating our actions with real time marketing data on behavioral and attitudinal trends, until the very concept of individuality is reconfigured, resulting in the death of independent thought and the elimination of many of our descendants by transpersonal mindviruses. For the benefit of those people at future of publishing panelstheres always one, for some reasonwho insist its really not about the text but the smell of the book, books will by this time be available exclusively as lines of fragrances. Subsequently, humans will modify themselves into a species with a powerful olfactory sense, able to read underwater by decoding strings of pheronomes. Aroma bibliography will triumph, as vast epics are composed for newly developed scent receptors, transforming the rising seas into a giant bath of community assisted transmedia content. Also around this time, the oral literature of dolphins will be deciphered and will turn out, inexplicably, to be all about vampires.

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