The future of the book

Corey Davis

Libraries continue to spend billions each year on paper books, but things are clearly changing. Electronic books are becoming a bigger slice of the pie, and massive digitization efforts by Google and others are creating online collections to rival the greatest libraries in the world. But the future of the book is about more than just a transition from print to screen. It’s about a transformation in the way that ideas are communicated. In a world where scholarship is happening less-and-less between the covers, what becomes of the book? And as research moves increasingly online, what will the written record look like to the scholars of the future?