The Plot Against the Book

In addition to inventing the generic villain "Information Scientist," it has been necessary to concoct a global conspiracy against print to warn people about. In all truth, I don't see how the accelerating pace of print obsolescence we are observing in American higher education could be done any more efficiently if there actually was such a plot. As libraries continue to weed collections to gain floor space for more computers, and as millennials continue to foster reading habits that prefer bite (byte) sized chunks of text, the future for the codex looks dark indeed. So dark that one can almost imagine a world where a cabal of information scientists meet secretly to plan the destruction of the last printing press on earth.