No one
library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no
one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written
work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of
human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with
just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to
complete that collection with different texts that are as
distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look
like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music,
or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present
at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really
granular observation, there are as many differences in our
"shared" experience as there are similarities.
More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference
between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of
books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can
hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by
analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
different queries.
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