The Future Part 3

At the time of this writing, there is one book getting published on Amazon every ninety seconds. If this post is approximately 600 words which should taken about three minutes to read, there will be four new books published on the online giant. Of the four books published during the reading of this, at least half will be self-published. And if you have a book which you think the world needs, you can probably publish your own book in about the same three minutes.

In a way, this is the greatest thing to every happen to the literate world. I mean, who wouldn't want to have all the books you could ever read at your disposal?

In a way, this is horrifying. Rather than having books, we now have data. We have data in lieu of any real knowledge. It's horrifying because we don't really have anything real, tactile, tangible. An ebook is great, but what happens when the “e” part fails. What do we do when the power goes out? We'll have the piece of mind that every ninety seconds a book was published.

Every ninety seconds? Can this be sustainable?

I have written two dozen novels. I did this over a period of almost as many years. I suppose I could get into a habit of self-publishing each of these, along with all the collections of stories and poems and musings, etc. Even if I do this, there is a finite amount of content that I've written. This leads me to think that there are many others just like me who have a few dozen pieces they've written. If we all self-publish everything we've ever written in an old fashioned land rush frenzy, there must be an end to the content. There has to be. At what point do we slow down?

Or we don't slow down.

Eventually, and this is what I think will probably happen, there will be no end to the data. There will be content rather than literature. Not only will there be more than we can read in a lifetime, there will be more titles than we can read in a lifetime. And like the screen on which we're doing our reading, what we read and experience will be two dimensional and flat.

Two dimensional and flat and ultimately traceable. It's traceable for marketing purposes. It's traceable should whatever it is we read become illegal.

And soon, technology will make reading obsolete.

Imagine that for a minute. What happens when someone develops an app that can inject a story into your mind without you having read it?

At this point, there is no stopping the content mill that Amazon has become. There is no stopping the books being released every ninety seconds. There is no stopping the virtual mountain of virtual data pilling up and up like an entire mountain range.

All that's left in the wake of this wild publishing tsunami is how we react to it. Most of us will be part of the system. Some of us won't. Someone born right now who lives for 85 years will know a world that will publish 29,804,400 books in her lifetime.