Thursday, April 21, 2011

The (Hilarious) Future of Books

Leave it to McSweeney's.

Some highlights from James Warner's article:

2020: All Books Will Be
Cross-Platform and Interactive.
Future "books" will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They'll 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 don't have to actually read the thing.

2030: All Books Will Be
Crowdsourced and Cloud-Based.

2040: Authors Will
Become Like Tamagotchi.

2050: Analog Reading Will Be
Digitally Simulated.

2070: We Will All Become Cyborgs.

2080: A Golden Age of
Informational Fluidity.
For the benefit of those people at future-of-publishing panels—there's always one, for some reason—who insist it's 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.

Read the whole glorious piece at: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2011/3/24warner.html

1 comment:

plumbing said...

Books has been part of our daily lives and it almost conquered everything. It contains a lot of lessons that we should know as a person and apply in our daily lives.