Future of the Book

So it’s almost dinner time and I haven’t posted yet today.  Then I realized, I had been working all day on future projects.  Some are next month, some a few months from now, and even one a year away.

I was so focused on the future that I lost track of the present...today’s post.  Thankfully though, all this future thinking reminded me of one of my favorite resources.

The Millions, hands down my favorite online literary site, is filled with interesting, outside the box writing about books and culture.  One example is the occasional feature, The Future of the Book. In this feature, authors and contributors take the title of said feature and craft an essay on that topic.

The results not only produce a nice range of essays on an interesting topic, but just looking through the archive of all of the essays in one place makes you realize what an open topic “The Future of the Book” is.  Just seeing the vastly different places each author takes this topic makes you think about what books mean to people-- right now. Because whenever we talk about “The Future,” we are actually analyzing the present [the definition of what SF does].

As a RA librarian, I think it is important to step back from time to time to look at books and reading from an “outside the library” perspective. This is a great example.

Click on over to the feature and see what you can learn about yourself, your patrons, and where reading and books are right now to get a sense of where you think it all going.