And so we saved another tree
One byproduct of cheap scanners and large hard drives has been the progress made in OCR. As of this evening, I have a small library in paper of several hundred volumes, and another library (virtual) of several thousand volumes. Ebooks are everywhere. I now collect bits and pieces from various newspapers and magazines in the ever so portable .pdf format. Teams of rascally e-monks are mimics of the historical scriptoriums of medieval times… but, no trees were mangled into paper to provide the media, and no lives were “lost in praise/prose”.
Will I ever get around to reading all my collected material? Who knows? Who else cares? If nothing else, the potential is worth the effort. I may get a chance to read a fifteen volume encyclopedia of religion, right after I work through a few score of movie scripts, or yet another King novel. I may not – after all, tomorrow doesn’t really ever get here.
