One of the most 'popular' posts of these past few weeks when I was absent from the blog, and indeed for a good long time (suddenly, commenters again - how did that happen?!), was last Monday's piece rueing the impact of the Kindle on our book culture.
We're now up to 18 comments on that (although, admittedly, half of them are my own responses and elaborations).
I am particularly grateful to long-time blog-friend Tony B (the tireless collator of Other Men's Flowers) for sending me a link to a very short - and amusing but terrifying - science fiction story on the topic of information storage and its practicalities, MS Fnd in a Lbry. Tony had posted about this almost-forgotten gem on his blog nearly 5 years ago. It was first published at the end of 1961, the work of Hal Draper (apparently best known as a Socialist theorist, though this story certainly whets the appetite for more of his fiction, if there is any), and it warns that if civilizations persist for millions or billions of years and expand across solar systems and galaxies.... not even the most sophisticated digitization and miniaturization technologies will save them from being smothered by the sheer mass of their history. Everything depends upon the indexing....
This story is far too good to be left unregarded in an old comment thread, so I am trying to give the link more prominence here. Please go and take a look at it.
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