Reprography

Rummaging through editions of the Canberra Times from my childhood, I came across an amusing article pondering the legal implications of "reprography" - that is, "photo-copying machines". "Librarians are great on futurology," it opens. "They portray for us a heaven in which the professor will be spared the minimum exercise he (or too often his research assistant) at present gets" by visiting the university library. "Instead he will stay in his study, press a button, and at a curt word of command the page of Kant, or Coke (?), Marx or Milton will come up on a television screen. Presumably there will be rows of these screens in some central reading place for the undergraduate students, rather like the rows of pokies we will soon see in the Canberra clubs."

The writer concludes that "having regard to my failing eyesight and hearing", he doesn't hope to live to see these "televised forms of book copying". (Perhaps fortunately, then, he passed away in the nineties, before Google Books' debut.) "If, however, the technologist could come up with a system by which the contents of books could be directly fed into the brain... I might be prepared to try the discomfort and cost of a monkey-gland operation or whatever" might be necessary. Give it ten years.

And the magnificent total is

Four nights away, working on average six hours a day:



... -500 words.

Of course, Part Two looked like bombed ruins and now looks like the middle of a novel, so none of that time was wasted, but yeesh.