What is this technology telling us? Copies don’t count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are that these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.

Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhatten Project of cultural digitisation. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

David Shields: Reality Hunger

Jaron Lanier: You Are Not A Gadget

both of which are manifestos.