Too Many Books
I got a Kindle 2 for Christmas.
Did you know that Google has books in the public domain scanned in, and you can download them in EPUB format, load them right on and go to town? Isn’t that just awesome?!
Consider this: Right now, Google has over 7.5 million books scanned written in English and in the public domain. If I could read those at a rate of one per minute, for 16 hours a day, I’d be finished in… roughly 21 years. And that’s just the free ones I actually can understand. I’ve been threatening to learn to read Japanese and Russian for a while, but if occurs to me now that if I do, I’ll have yet more books to read.
As it is, I already have over 200 books on the thing. Most of them science fiction paperbacks. If you stacked them one on top of another, they’d reach 12.5 feet high. I haven’t had to charge it in a month. Pretty impressive for something that’s only a third of an inch thick.
In a single copy of the New York Times, there is more information than your average medieval peasant was exposed to in their entire life. In the Information Age, you will not be characterized by the amount of information you have available to you. You will be characterized by the quality of information you receive, the choices of what you take in.
Think about that next time somebody sends you another email with a LOLcat in it.