Some Day, You’ll Have a Telephone with a Screen and Be Able To Dial a Book

> I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. My handful of crystal corn - my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks - larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical science. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that - as it told me - it was linked directly, through electronic catalogs, to templates of every book on earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single "copies" of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the contents of the work was recorded in a crystal.

> The originals - Crystomatrices - were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enamel the steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1024

My favorite one is from Gottlieb Daimler 1901:

"The global demand for automobiles will not exceed one million - at least because of a lack of available chauffeurs." [1]

He is the founder of the predecessor of todays Daimler AG, which owns Mercedes-Benz.

[1] losely translated from German: "Die weltweite Nachfrage nach Kraftfahrzeugen wird eine Million nicht überschreiten - allein schon aus Mangel an verfügbaren Chauffeuren."

KIRK: Yes. (Notices the piles of books everywhere) What is all this? COGLEY: I figure we'll be spending some time together, so I moved in. KIRK: I hope I'm not crowding you. COGLEY: What's the matter? Don't you like books? KIRK: Oh, I like them fine, but a computer takes less space.

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/15.htm

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/did-st...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI

http://www.doi-toshin.com/paul-otlet-s-vision-documentation-...

https://www.wimp.com/isaac-asimov-predicted-the-internet-of-...

(the interview is from 1988, so it's now dated over 30 years)

I believe there are much older references to a worldwide library accessible by anyone from home in his writings, but I can't recall where. I admit having been a huge fan of his teaching about science (I was reading a book by him when the muted TV showed the news about his death) and I also loved his short stories, even those not related to scientific information or science fiction, but never liked his bigger novels, the Foundation that I quit after not even finishing one book etc. so my knowledge is very limited in that context.

I think a lot of public ideas of the future sprung out from that

I don't think the quote refers to a portable telephone but rather of the style that was demonstrated at the World Fair

[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/long-before-facet...

Predicting a telephone with a screen in 1969 required no great skill at prophecy, since the AT&T picture phone debuted at the 1964 World's Fair. Really the idea of being able to remotely dial up information and services on some kind of telephone/computer console with a screen was all over the place by 1969. There were, after all, commercial time-sharing computer services.

I don't see any evidence that the quote refers to cell phones, since it doesn't mention portability. But even if it did, to predict that in 1969 was likewise not so impressive, since mobile radio-telephone service had existed since the 1940s, and the cellular concept for frequency re-use was conceived in the same era.

Essentially, a machine provides all necessities of life in a persons' pod, so they need never leave. People spend their time making essentially YouTube videos about their opinions. Nobody cares about facts or knowledge anymore. Spoiler, it doesn't end well for them.

[0] http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

--begin quote--

There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

https://i.giphy.com/media/l3vR6aasfs0Ae3qdG/giphy.webp

Bass was remarkable prescient, but also recognized the inevitable macro forces that would create change in his business.

I'm curious about this. What was wrong with the Newspad evidence? Seems convincing and relevant enough to me.

> What then? he was asked. “Then I go into the antiques business — books will be antiques,” Mr. Bass said.