y career has spanned the greatest information revolution in human history, the scale of which has dwarfed anything occurring before, including the oft-compared introduction of the printing press in the late 15th century. The comparison with Gutenberg may have been apt as the World Wide Web came into general use in the mid-1990s, but it has since become increasingly quaint and hollow-sounding with the continuing rapid development of digital communications. Indeed, what is occurring is so sweeping that it may well go down in the history books as one of the greatest revolutions ever, without qualification. This revolution may not seem as convulsive as the great socio-political revolutions in history--the French Revolution comes to mind--but it is every bit as disruptive in spite of its non-violent nature. Its sweep and scale is so great that even our image of reality is becoming reshaped in terms of information, of conceptual bits and bytes.

This transformation has been affecting every aspect of society, most directly the information-related fields such as librarianship and the world of publishing. Though it does not capture the same degree of media attention as the sweeping changes affecting the music and video industries, the transformation of scholarly communication has been just as dramatic and pervasive. Having worked in the largest research libraries in the world, I have actively participated in this transformation, and the experience has been both exhilarating and unsettling in its relentless pace. Could we have guessed in management meetings in 1995, in even our wildest of brainstorming sessions, that a short decade later a private company would announce it would digitize and make available the entire collections of several of the largest research libraries in the world? Something so monumental would have been decades away, not just a few short years. Though I would have never thought it possible a few short years ago I, along with a growing number of researchers, can foresee the demise and eventual disappearance of the printed book. These kinds of sweeping changes have been occurring in multiple areas simultaneously, making it difficult for even the most astute and informed experts to make reliable predictions.

When I sent my first BITNET email as a graduate student at UCLA in 1980, little did I know that three decades later email would become my primary form of communication, even surpassing the telephone. I would carry in my pocket a powerful mobile computer--the iPhone--that would allow me to both communicate and tap into a vast universe of information located around the world and updated in real time. Included in the functionality of this mobile computer is an electronic messaging device that can instantly send multimedia messages to anyone around the world, give my exact location on a satellite map, provide real-time navigation, hold the full text of several hundred books from my personal library, provide access to a massive encyclopedia of universal knowledge, and allow me to choose from several thousand songs out of my personal music collection. These features alone are in themselves transformational, but there’s more, much more: with my iPhone, I have access to countless thousands of special programs or applications (“apps”), effectively morphing the device into any number of other utilitarian tools needed to carry out my day. From a Theodolite to a sound level meter, my iPhone can morph itself into any number of devices with the click of a button.

Everything described above in terms of features for this little pocket computer can be distilled down to a single, simple principle: information, digital information. Reconceptualizing our material world of gadgets into devices based on the manipulation of digital information

Initially having a disruptive effect on libraries and the world of book publishing, this transformation has taken on the qualities of a tsunami. What was once disruptive has now become convulsive, and both libraries and publishers, as central players in the world of scholarly communication, are scrambling to keep pace with the rapidly changing information landscape.

The earliest essays found here go back to 2006, about the time I began building the Website for my doctoral dissertation. It was also around the time the first Sony Reader became available in the United States, incorporating a new digital paper technology and in its general appeal representing a watershed moment in the history of electronic publishing. I had recently left my senior management position in the Harvard College Library to complete my doctorate, and at the time Google was fully engaged in digitizing the library’s vast collections as part of its Google Books project.

My involvement with etexts and digital publishing goes back to