From Anthony Grafton’s New Yorker article, Future Reading: digitization and its discontents:
Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear . . .
The online records of the Patent and Trademark Office are a boon for anyone interested in its spectacular panorama of the brilliance and lunacy of American tinkerers . . .
The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating . . .
