Latest Tools

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, five centuries before eBooks made their appearance. In the intervening time humanity seems to have made huge progress in science and technology and hardly any improvement at all in psychology and human affairs. If the world survives the solar storms that are predicted for the years 2012 and 2013 it may be time for a new surge in human intellect, understanding and moral capacity.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, five centuries before eBooks made their appearance. In the intervening time humanity seems to have made huge progress in science and technology and hardly any improvement at all in psychology and human affairs. If the world survives the solar storms that are predicted for the years 2012 and 2013 it may be time for a new surge in human intellect, understanding and moral capacity.

Reading and writing are, in the first place, technological skills. Although spiritual and emotional matters may be recorded and debated in writing and reading, the factual realities of practical things are more easily handled though literacy skills. For example, a scientific formulation that is expressed and explained in words can easily be understood and extrapolated when new problems and needs emerge. However, a moral dilemma such as suicide bombing might defy any logical analysis.

However, all agree that the modern computer in use is the outcome of shared knowledge and many discrete inventions. The miraculous technology that allows a person in England to have a face-to-face conversation with a friend in China is not a single achievement but many advances synthesized in a single technological achievement.

The technology is brilliant but details of the conversation may be mundane or banal. The emotional and intellectual qualities of the individuals that make up society do not equate with the technological brilliance produced by collaborative endeavor.

If popular culture is an indication of the collective intellectual power of the world there would seem to be room for improvement. Films that would not test the intellectual capacity of birds are made and screened in full public view, and apparently accepted without a squirm by many reviewers some of whom award them stars.

Although efforts to raise the collective intellect of humanity may not have made much progress over many centuries the idea behind e-books is that it can be done. Five centuries may have passed since the introduction of physical books to the broad public, but e-books are as new as the Internet which was only born in the final decades of the twentieth century.

The mission of Project Gutenberg is to take the effect of the printing press to a yet higher level. Mass literacy may not yet have achieved in the humanities what has been achieved in technology but with technology put to good use in promoting minds rather than wars there is hope for the future. Online vendors of digital products with resell rights such as e-books are spreading a sort of education that may have consequences for humanity that are almost unimaginable. A few years ago the achievements of information technology could not be conceived of but they are now a reality. In a few more years a generation of human beings with advanced intellectual powers may make their grandparents look silly.