The universal library is an awesome concept. A paradigm shift because all books will be linked together. And the user, the here-to-for reader, will become, in effect, the author because his or her choices of links will create a unique order of content, different from anyone else's. Check it out. Peter Van

From "What Will Happen to Books" A manifesto by Kevin Kelly, The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006, p. 45-46.

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced farther, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorderes songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes, the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" - a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. . . Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income from curating an excellent collection.