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The largest collection of knowledge in the world was once contained in the scrolls of the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt. As the story goes, Ptolemy III by royal decree required all visitors to the city of Alexandria to surrender all books and scrolls in their possession for copying by official scribes. Alexandria became a haven for knowledge and knowledge seekers (until the library was burned down).

The Internet is now likely the largest collection of knowledge in the world, distributed but still accessible. Yet the Internet has to date been an imperfect substitute for a book, just as a book is an imperfect substitute for the Internet.

For a reader, the advantages of a book over the Internet are (a) a book has a particular tactile feel and easy to read appearance, (b) a book is always on, (c) a book has a certain kind of durability and yet is low cost, (d) a book is difficult to copy elegantly without specialized equipment and therefore book publishers easily attract authors who wish to be compensated for their work, and (e) the audience of readers are accustomed to buying books.

Although electronic books are available, there has never been a particularly graceful way of reading them. That, I believe, will soon change. A number of companies have tried to devise an electronic device to replace the book exactly.  Meanwhile, a number of websites allow consumers to download many books that are in the public domain.  Storage capacities are increasing so swiftly that soon 1 terabyte drives will be coming to laptops and ipods.

At some point the displays of electronic books will improve sufficiently, download services will be easy enough to use, and the storage capacities of electronic books will be so much better than they used to be, that the book publishing world will be forever altered.

My Treo 650 cell phone has a keyboard.  I’m pretty sure whatever I buy after my Treo 650 will also have a keyboard.  It’s just so useful for email, looking up websites, and writing reminders to myself.

If my cell phone had perfect voice recognition or a perfect touch screen, I might be able to do without a keyboard.  While that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime in the next few years, a clever company called Jott has come up with something almost as good for sending yourself reminders.

You register at their website (http://www.jott.com), then whenever you call their special 800 number, the message you leave in the voicemail at that number is automatically emailed to you in both voice and text formats.

One night in 1991, John Ellenby and his son Thomas were sailing off the coast of Mexico. To compensate for John Ellenby’s poor sense of direction, they tied together a compass, a Global Positioning System receiver and binoculars. That made it possible for them to simply to point at an object or a navigational landmark to identify it. The Ellenby’s, to their credit, didn’t stop there. They formed a company, GeoVector, that developed software that allows a user of a wireless device to simply point at an item in the real world and click to obtain information about the item. Japanese wireless carriers are the first to deploy this innovation.

As the New York Times states:

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at. …. Think of it as a divining rod for the information age.

This is a particularly interesting form of geographically based search. Click here for the rest of the article.