Two Creatures from the Future Confront a Difficult Puzzle
June 15, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I was interested in a suggestion a colleague made to me at lunch. “Check out the new printed World Book encyclopedia.”
I replied, “A new one. Printed? Doesn’t information change quickly today.”
My lunch colleague said, “That’s what I have heard.”
I offered, “Who wants a printed, hard-to-change content objects? Where’s the fun in sneaky or sockpuppet edits? Do you really want to go back to non-fluid information?”
My hungry debate opponent said, “What? Do you mean misinformation is good?”
I said, “It’s a digital world. Get with the program.”
Navigate to World Book.com and check out the 10 page sample about dinosaurs. When I scanned the entry, there was no information about dinobabies. I was disappointed because the dinosaur segment is bittersweet for these reasons:
- The printed encyclopedia is a dinosaur of sorts, an expensive one to produce and print at that
- As a dinobaby, I was expecting an IBM logo or maybe an illustration of a just-RIF’ed IBM worker talking with her attorney about age discrimination
- Those who want to fill a bookshelf can buy books at a second hand bookstore or connect with a zippy home designer to make the shelf tasteful. I think there is wallpaper of books on a shelf as an alternative.
Two aliens are trying to figure out what a single volume of a World Book encyclopedia contains? I assume the creatures will be holding the volume 6 “I”, the one with information about the Internet. The image comes from the creative bits at MidJourney.
Let me dip into my past. Ah, you are not interested? Tough. Here we go down memory lane:
In 1953 or 1954, my father had an opportunity to work in Brazil. Off our family went. One of the must-haves was a set of World Book encyclopedias. The covers were brown; the pictures were most black and white; and the information was, according to my parents, accurate.
The schools in Campinas, Brazil, at that time used one language. Portuguese. No teacher spoke English. Therefore, after failing every class except mathematics, my parents decided to get me a tutor. The course work was provided by something called Calvert in Baltimore, Maryland. My teacher would explain the lesson, watch me read, ask me a couple of questions, and bail out after an hour or two. That lasted about as long as my stint in the Campinas school near our house. My tutor found himself on the business end of a snake. The snake lived; the tutor died.
My father — a practical accountant — concluded that I should read the World Book encyclopedia. Every volume. I think there were about 20 plus a couple of annual supplements. My mother monitored my progress and made me write summaries of the “interesting” articles. I recall that interesting or not, I did one summary a day and kept my parents happy.
I hate World Books. I was in the fourth or fifth grade. Campinas had great weather. There were many things to do. Watch the tarantulas congregate in our garage. Monitor the vultures circling my mother when she sunbathed on our deck. Kick a soccer ball when the students got out of school. (I always played. I sucked, but I had a leather, size five ball. Prior to our moving to the neighborhood, the kids my age played soccer with a rock wrapped in rags. The ball was my passport to an abuse free stint in rural Brazil.)
But a big chunk of my time was gobbled by the yawing white maw of a World Book.
When we returned to the US, I entered the seventh grade. No one at the public school in Illinois asked about my classes in Brazil. I just showed up in Miss Soape’s classroom and did the assignments. I do know one thing for sure: I was the only student in my class who did not have to read the assigned work. Reading the World Book granted me a free ride through grade school, high school, and the first couple of years at college.
Do I recommend that grade school kids read the World Book cover to cover?
No, I don’t. I had no choice. I had no teacher. I had no radio because the electricity was on several hours a day. There was no TV because there were no broadcasts in Campinas. There were no English language anything. Thus, the World Book, which I hate, was the only game in town.
Will I buy the print edition of the 2023 World Book? Not a chance.
Will other people? My hunch is that sales will be a slog outside of library acquisitions and a few interior decorators trying to add color to a client’s book shelf.
I may be a dinobaby, but I have figured out how to look up information online.
The book thing: I think many young people will be as baffled about an encyclopedia as the two aliens in the illustration.
By the way, the full set is about $1,200. A cheap smartphone can be had for about $250. What will kids use to look up information? If you said, the printed encyclopedia, you are a rare bird. If you move to a remote spot on earth, you will definitely want to lug a set with you. Starlink can be expensive.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2023
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