In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com)

Bouyed by it's success many believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of this online library, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favourite book will, over time, link it up so that by the generous act of by millions of readers, this universal library can be integrated in full. 

From the days of the Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, three million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public web pages.

This material is currently contained in libraries and archives of the world and when digitised, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50-petabyte hard disks. Although that would fit in a building the size of a small library - tomorrow's technology could fit all that into an iPod! 

Digitising books has only started to make sense recently, with search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written.

In 2004 Google announced that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable. At best, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital - however that is changing fast. Amazon has digitised several hundred thousand contemporary books and in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning it's eight million book collection using a state-of-the-art robot. This machine, the size of a small car, automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at a rate of 1000 pages an hour.

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of online relationships. Of the estimated 100 billion web pages, each page contains an average of 10 links. That's a trillion information connections - the tangle of relationships that makes the web so powerful. Relationships found in search engines such as Google and linking system such as Wikipedia, will transform the static world of book knowledge as each page in a book discovers other pages in other books.

When books are digitised, reading becomes a community activity (like the Wikipedia concept) and bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Friends, family and co-workers will swap linked information in such a fashion that the technology of search will transform isolated information into one big online library - a very, very large book and the world's universal library of human knowledge.