Snow Crash

The Googlezon story, or Robin Sloan's "Epic" animation that we looked at at the end of the class last week, reminds me of a book by Neal Stephenson called "Snow Crash". Stephenson fills this book with a lot of fascinating predictions about the near future (the book was written in 1992), including the idea of people who make their living indiscriminately recording information and uploading it to the (now corporatised) Library of Congress, in the hope that some of it will be downloaded (and paid for) by someone, somewhere, with the result that royalties will be paid.

Great book, if you're looking for something to read in all your free time.

(By the way, this was originally posted in August 2005. I just edited it on 7 Aug 2006, but not in any way that changes its meaning significantly.)