Having easily searchable text will transform scholarship. Reading
scholarly books cover to cover may become as odd as listening to
albums cover to cover. My colleague at AUDC, Robert Sumrell suggests
that complete availability and the ease of search will undo the need
to read books at all. To some extent, I suppose it will. Moreover, the
staggering amount of knowledge that will be at your fingertips may
well act as a disincentive to create. The music industry hasn't just
collapsed because nobody is purchasing music: there haven't been any
new movements since hip-hop, alternative, and electronica. In part,
this may be because technology now makes it possible to produce any
sounds you can conceive of so technology is actually not a driver for
music anymore and in part, this may be because local scenes just don't
develop the way they used to now that music spreads across the world
in minutes. When everything is known, Baudrillard would suggest, we
have no need for anything anymore.
-- Kazys Varnelis. "Some notes on the iPad" (3 April, 2010)
http://varnelis.net/blog/some_notes_on_the_ipad