More Words, Deeper Hole

It's interesting how often people, especially older people, in SF books preferred old-fashioned books to whatever was currently popular in the invented world at the time. Almost like people getting book nostalgia before there were any alternatives to books.

That nostalgia stemmed from the microfilm revolution, which carried the same replacement-of-paper-books rhetoric we saw accompanying e-books.

A library in a shoebox. It was a tantalizing idea. See also "As We May Think."

(I often look at obscure technical government stuff. A lot of digitized documents today seem to be derived from microfilm copies. So microfilm served as a bridge to the e-book era in some ways.)