In his unfinished utopian novel, writer and thinker Vladimir Odoyevsky not only talked about the Internet, but also proposed the concept of an e-ink reader and a ‘novel machine’. Do you recognise our century?
The invention of a book in which the letters are changed into several books by means of a machine. Machines for novels and for the domestic drama. ...The time will come when books will be written in the syllable of telegraphic dispatches; only tables, maps and some theses on sheets of paper will be excluded from this custom. Printing houses will be used only for newspapers and business cards; correspondence will be replaced by electric conversation; novels will live on, but not for long — they will be replaced by the theatre; educational books will be replaced by public lectures. The new worker of science will have a lot of work to do: in the morning to fly around (then instead of carriages will be aerostats) with a dozen lectures, to read up to twenty newspapers and as many books, to write on the fly a dozen pages and to really hurry to the theatre; but the main thing will be: to wean the mind from fatigue, to accustom it to pass instantly from one subject to another; to refine it so that the most difficult operation will be easy to it from the first minute; a mathematical formula will be found for attacking in a huge book exactly the page that is needed, and quickly calculating how many pages can then be passed through without flaw. ‘The Year 4338. Petersburg letters’ (1835) — Vladimir Odoyevsky
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