A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle Page B

send a tape and be done with it? Incidentally, the NY Trib had no typewriters or paper at all: reporters and rewrite persons worked on a TV screen, editors called that up to their screens, and when done the text went directly to composing without ever being on paper at all. JEP)
    Once a book is in the central utility data banks, those who want to read it can call it up to their TV screen; a royalty goes from their bank account to the author's; where is the need for printer or publisher? Of course some will still want books that you can feel and carry around; but a great deal of publishing can be as described above, and for that matter there's no reason why your home terminal cannot make at reasonable cost a hard copy of anything you really want to keep.
    Few publishers own printing plants; most hire that done. What publishers provide is editorial services and distribution. The latter function will largely vanish: the information utility does that job. There remain editorial services.
    With such a plethora of books as might appear given the above—after all, the only cost to "publish" a book would be to have it typed, plus a rather nominal fee to the utility for storing it—critics and editors will probably grow in importance. "Recommended and edited by Jim Baen," or "A Frederick Pohl Selection" would take on new significance, and one assumes that these editors would continue to work with authors since they'd hardly recommend a book they didn't like (and some authors might even admit that a good editor can help a book). "Big Name" authors would probably have little to worry about, with their readers setting in standing orders for their works; new writers would probably have to get a "name critic" to review their stuff.
    OK; still not all that new for veteran science fiction readers; but did you catch the time scale? The equipment, all of it, exists now. The telephone net to link nearly everyone in the US with the information utilities exists now. Computer electronics costs are plummeting. McCarthy's home terminal can be with us in the next five years, with the information utility fully developed in ten to fifteen.
    In fact, the only obstacle is entrepreneurial: the equipment and technology exist at affordable costs. It takes only someone to organize it.
    But—in twenty years we may not need the home terminals except as backup. Dr. Adam Reed of Rockefeller University has a new scheme: direct computer to brain hookups.
    Ten years: Dr. Reed believes that within ten years we will have cracked the code that the brain uses for information processing and storage. Once that's done, information can be fed directly into the brain's central processing unit without going through such comparatively slow peripheral equipment as eyes and ears. You need not read a book: the computer can squirt the book's contents directly into your mind.
    Of course it won't be the same experience: that is, when I read War and Peace there was more than a transfer of information. There were also emotional responses. Those would be lacking in the direct information-acquisition experience. Thus there will probably remain a few nuts who read, just as TV hasn't quite eliminated literacy in the US; but it may well be that within your lifetime the normal method of acquiring information, particularly of grasping the content of dull books that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read, will be through computers.
    This means a complete restructuring of our education system, and perhaps it is high time; yet I have met few teachers who have thought about the new capability at all, and there is no one I know of planning for the time when we do not have to sit in classrooms for the first twenty years of our lives.
    There will always be a need for education, of course; for those who can teach their pupils to use the information available to them; and who will teach them to be civilized (although that latter may not be a function of schools, and certainly is only