love letter to books

Google built an LLM-powered summarization feature for the web that scrapes a page for reader bullet points. This move prompts my thinking about other design choices of the internet that compose its character.

How often do we use a look-up function to skip past content and find our treasured answer? What do we miss with the flick of the wrist’s motion to a conclusion unearned? Where is our attention pulled by a side-loaded advertisement in the midst of deeper understanding? The internet’s limitless and distracted perversion of knowledge into what we call “information” stands in direct contrast to its profound and liberating predecessor that bears few similarities.

Books require patient, intentional, intelligent attention to glean the same “information” but are about so much more. Reading is a journey for two. Author and audience partake in a transformative labor to do more than simply digest words. Words from books stay with us long after we’ve read them. Whether consciously or not, we live our lives from the effort we expended in taking the time to understand a vital truth, go on an epic quest, or become humbled by another human’s experiences.

From page to page, we are aware of the great struggle in its making. When we hold its outer bindings, we sense the wisdom of an entire lifetime, career, or era packed between our fingers. As we begin the first page, we realize that this act of beginning anew could change our lives in lasting ways.

A book has never been merely a book as the internet is not simply the internet. They are both collections of human knowledge that are designed to create environments for us to do two things: thrive or detach.