Re: Re: An audiobook as the definitive form

> I went into Borders just before Xmas and it was wall to wall people,
> buying books.

Well, buying Christmas presents, anyway.  I bought 8 CDs and two books
in Borders just before Christmas, all as Christmas presents.  (LITTLE
HEATHENS, a memoir of 30's Iowa farm life, and THE WAY OF THE SHIP, a
chronicle of American shipping).  For myself, I went to a good used
book store (Renaissance Books in the Milwaukee airport), and got a
copy of A. J. Liebling's BETWEEN MEALS (1959, so still not up on
Google Books; give it another 50 years).

> The one thing they have
> in common is predicting great change, which hasn't occured.  Meanwhile
> none of them predicted the internet or the cell phone.

Well, neither is really "great change", is it?  The Internet is
basically the telegraph (store-and-forward adaptive-routing digital
packet network over wires or radio), with automated telegraph
operators.  The cell phone is just the telephone, over radio links
instead of wires, much like Morse code over radio instead of wires.
The telephone or airplane was probably a much greater change than
either.

The "great change" in our world is really computers, which makes both
of the above possible by automating the complex interactions that make
them possible, as well as enabling ebook readers and Wikipedia and
Google Books and Facebook and outsourcing call centers to India and
this conversation we're having.  And I agree; most speculative fiction
really underestimated the effect of computers.

Bill


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