Time
magazine had a great issue in its July 6 publication. It had all kinds of statistics and facts
about the world, life, and the things that sometimes consume our thoughts. One section discussed the invention timeline. It’s interesting to note certain things, such
as these:
The first
humans walked upright six million years ago, but seemingly our truly advanced
history only begins about 10,000 years ago.
What happened for the other 5.99 million years?
Soap
came 4200 years ago but toilet paper is only some 1200 years old. What did they use before that?
The
first university came about in Morocco in 859 AD and gunpowder was invented
around the same time in China.
Gutenberg
invented the printing press in 1440.
Five and a half centuries after that the world went digital.
In
1826 the first photograph was taken. It wasn't a selfie.
Believe
it or not, by 1837 the electric car was invented. We haven’t advanced much in 200 years!
In
1752 Ben Franklin uncovered the secrets of electricity but it wasn’t until 1879
that Edison developed a decent lightbulb.
The phone was invented in the 1870s, too.
Airplanes
came about in 1903 and talking movies came out in 1927. TV came on in 1925.
We
moonwalked in ’69, launched the Internet in ’80, and kicked off social media
with Facebook in 2004. Amazon’s ebook
launched with the Kindle in 2007.
So
what can be invented that would help advance the distribution, writing,
selling, and discussion of books? If you
believe, as I do, that books are the building blocks to society, then you, too,
would want to advance the world of books as quickly and effectively as
possible. But we want books to retain
their properties while trying to advance their dissemination and usefulness. We need there to be a way for book creators to
earn decent money while at the same time, the reading public has fair and equal
access to all of the published books.
One
day robots might read books for us – and then they’ll have a way to download
both the content and the emotional response we’d feel when reading a book and
inject that into our brains and bodies.
Perhaps that’s the invention that will be a game-changer to the
industry.
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