Farewell to “The Book People List”

by Michael Hart on December 23, 2007
News

Well, life today, as so often, has been so hectic, with newspaper articles and interviews to do about the recent PR blitzes from billion dollar products or at least what they HOPE will be such, that I am down to the wire with well under an hour to Mark’s deadline and so I must do what I can with the time I have left…and apologize for not doing more.

As always, I lean more towards the future and less towards the past than most of us do, with a little care towards preserving such “look and feel” paper and it predecessors have given us over millennia.

My own concern at this final Book People juncture, is for the future, a future I think we will find a great of which we have failed to consider when and if we look back on this date a decade from now, or especially from even longer periods, though I will not likely be with you a decade from now.

My first prediction for 2018 is about cell phones.

Cell phones will be the dominant communications of the world at large, connecting the Internet and an extraordinary host of other things, via downloads, and an assortment of flash products people should, literally, have been thinking about already.

Flash movies from stores.

Flash movies via snailmail.

Flash movies via downloads.

Why?

Because flash chips will be verging on terabytes.

Terabytes that fit on your keychain much the ways the gigabytes do now, only USB 5.0 will be faster so that loading up a movie won’t take a minute.

Music is already obvious, no need to mention it.

My second prediction about 2018 is about drives.

With terabyte flash coming up around 2018, needs for hard drives with physical moving parts would be declining… not gone…but declining.

Hard drives the size of spare change will litter the internal world of many gizmos the way Z80’s, if you remember those, littered computer boards.

However, moving parts will eventually be seen to be a limiting factor for durability, and go.

The One Laptop Per Child computer will never get into true flight, but WILL be remembered as that first glimpse of no moving electronic parts.

Eventually membrane keyboards will be added, and there will be little or no real moving parts.

Hard drives will not be gone, but will be going.

My third prediction about 2018 is about eBooks.

The world will be redoing all the eBooks.

Finally, having figured out that eBooks are when the world will change in modern times as much or more as when Johannes Gutenberg changed it, with the advent of The Gutenberg Press, the world can finally embrace what will finally lead us to the kind of Literacy Revolution Gutenberg caused.

That Literacy Revolution will lead to education.

Education Revolution makes Scientific Revolution.

Scientific Revolution make Industrial Revolution.

“The Neo-Industrial Revolution” when a production scale as massive compared to ours as was original “Industrial Revolution” than their predecessor is going to make it POSSIBLE for EVERYONE TO HAVE…

EVERYTHING!!!

Of course, there will be “Mickey Mouse copyrights and other legalisms to fight this. . . .

The “Haves” will fight the “Have Nots” to keep an entire population subjugated, as always.

So, I leave you with the parting words above.

Revolution.
Revolution!
REVOLUTION!!!

Give The World eBooks.

The rest is “history!”

Thanks!!!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg

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