The exponential expansion of computing power will keep changing the rules and opening new possibilities that will seem as remote and farfetched then as some of the things I’ve speculated on here might seem today. Talent and creativity have always shaped advances in unpredictable ways … The information highway will open undreamed-of artistic and scientific opportunities to a new generation of geniuses.
Some documents will be aimed at paying audiences and some will be free to anyone who wants to pay attention. Digital storage is fantastically inexpensive. Hard-disk drives in personal computers will soon cost about 15 cents per megabyte (million bytes) of information. To put this in perspective 1 megabyte will hold about 700 pages of text, so the cost is something like $0.00021 per page – about one two-hundredth what the local copy center would charge at 5 cents a page. And because there is the option of reusing the storage space for something else, the cost is actually the cost of storage per unit time – in other words, of renting space. If we assume just a three-year average lifetime for the hard-drive disk, the amortized price per page per year is $0.00007. And storage is getting cheaper all the time. Hard-disk prices have been dropping by about 50 percent per year for the last several years.
Among all the types of paper documents, narrative fiction is one of the few that will not benefit from electronic organization. Almost every reference book has an index, but novel don’t because there is no need to be able to look something up in a novel. Novels are linear. Likewise, we’ll continue to watch most movies from start to finish. This isn’t a technological judgment – it is an artistic one. Their linearity is intrinsic to the storytelling process. New forms of interactive fiction are being invented that take advantage of the electronic world, but linear novels and movies will still be popular.
Electronic documents … will be interactive. Request a kind of information, and the document responds. Indicate that you’ve changed your mind, and the document responds again. Once you get used to this sort of system, you find that being able to look at information in different ways makes that information more valuable. The flexibility invites exploration, and the exploration is rewarded by discovery. You will be able to get your daily news in a similar way.
By the end of the decade, a significant percentage of documents, even in offices, won’t even be fully printable on paper. They will be like a movie or a song is today. You will be able to print a two-dimensional view of its content, but it will be like reading a musical score instead of experiencing an audio recording.
The exciting aspect of digital documentation is the redefinition of the document itself. This will cause dramatic repercussions. We will have to rethink not only what is meant by the term “document,” but also by “author,” “publisher,” “office,” “classroom,” and “textbook.”
Ultimately, incremental improvements in computer and screen technology will give us a lightweight, universal electronic book, or “e-book,” which will approximate today’s paper book. Inside a case roughly the same size and weight as today’s hardcover or paperback book, you’ll have a display that can show high-resolution text, pictures, and video. You’ll be able to flip pages with your finger or use voice commands to search for the passages you want. Any document on the network will be accessible from such a device. The real point of electronic documents is not simply that we will read them on hardware devices. Going from paper book to e-book is just the final stage of a process already well under way.
On the information highway, rich electronic documents will be able to do things no piece of paper can. The highway’s powerful database technology will allow them to be indexed and retrieved using interactive exploration. It will be extremely cheap and easy to distribute them. In short, these new digital documents will replace many printed paper ones because they will be able to help us in new ways. But not for quite some time. The paper-based book, magazine, or newspaper still have a lot of advantages over its digital counterpart. To read a digital document you need an information appliance such as a personal computer. A book is small, lightweight, high-resolution, and inexpensive compared to the cost of a computer. For at least a decade it won’t be as convenient to read a long, sequential document on a computer screen as on paper. The first digital documents to achieve widespread use will do so by offering new functionality rather than simply duplicating the older medium.
The major benefit of the PC revolution has been the way it has empowered people. The highway’s low-cost communications will empower in an even more fundamental way. The beneficiaries won’t just be technology-oriented individuals. As more and more computers are connected to high-bandwidth networks, and as software platforms provide a foundation for great applications, everyone will have access to most of the world’s information.
Mathematicians today believe that 250-digit-long product of two primes would take millions of years to factor with any foreseeable amount of future computing power. But who really knows? This uncertainty – and the unlikely but conceivable possibility that someone could come up with an easy way of factoring big numbers – means that a software platform for the information highway will have to be designed in such a way that its encryption scheme can be changed readily.