THE GLASS BOOK

© Dana W. Paxson 2024

Background of the Invention

The world of publishing, including the publishing of text, images, and other presentations for human perception and cognition, has been revolutionized by electronics.  To summarize the transformations now still in progress would be impossible, but overall we’ve seen the printed, bound set of pages we call a book become an invisible, mutable image on a screen, connected to a nearly-infinite entity that is bound only into the limits of its reader’s capacity and endurance.

This change raises important questions, among them this: What is the fate of a permanent piece of literature or other published work?  Do such works vanish into the digital storm, swallowed by technological obsolescence, never to reappear?  Our whole evolution of civilization has depended on its memory as recorded in its publications; what will become of civilization if our memories of vital knowledge and wisdom do not prolong their useful lives in permanent forms for our descendants?

Projects like The Long Now address issues of this sort.  The very symbol of The Long Now – the symbol X with a bar over it – stands for 10,000 in Roman numerals, signifying ten thousand years as a useful, vital framework for planning, preservation, and continuation of our human world into the future.  Such a long view must be underpinned by an infrastructure of memory, and our books, reinvented into all their most-durable and most-potent forms, will provide that memory.

But current technologies haven’t reached that stage of permanence yet.  Even the most durable of books in their oldest known forms lack the kind of demonstrable durability for a ten-thousand-year lifetime.  Also, those most durable of books, whether chiseled in stone, baked into ceramic tablets, rolled up in parchments, or printed in chemically-preserved paper sheets bound together, lose meaning as the inevitable entropy of cultures washes over them with each passing millennium.  Not only do our ten-millennial descendants, who will at the rate of five generations per century be our five-hundred-times-great-grandchildren, face the problem of finding our words, but they also confront the difficulty of interpreting them through time.

Our future civilizations would benefit greatly from a book that is nearly-indestructible on millennial time scales, resilient and protected from accumulating errors in stored and communicated content, packed densely and accessibly with information available at a touch, self-powered by light energy, easy to handle and use, and carrying in its contents some means for assisting readers unfamiliar with the languages and backgrounds of its creators.

With respect to dense, accessible, easy-to-use, easy-to-contextualize information, we already have technology for creation of standalone, densely-linked, multithreaded, easy-to-use electronic books that give their readers a wealth of methods for exploring entire cultures, languages, and texts from sources separated by time, place, and circumstance from the reader’s world. An interlinked set of such electronic books, stored and preserved in a single durable object and easily accessible to a user under a wide range of conditions, would constitute an entire library for its reader, a long-lasting library carried easily in one’s hand.

Publishers who want to create digital books, even libraries, that can be handled and treated like any book, that last beyond the lifetimes of generations, that never change their contents or functioning, and that give readers a world of interconnections and threads, would seek the ability to create such a library in a single handheld product. The product would be global, a leap out of the existing paradigms, attractive and lasting, a convenient physical handheld object usable with nothing but a light source.

Books will go into space, and into other locales of extreme conditions. Whether they are manuals of operation, reference encyclopedias and databases, work of fiction, chronicles, or any other kind of book, books will be subjected to the rigors of space, sometimes being put under rapid, deep stress: cosmic ray bombardment, EMP, micrometeor strike, onset of hard vacuum, extremes of temperature, physical shock. Current efforts focus around the hardening of electronic components and systems against damage from these and other sources of stress. Such hardening methods and others still to be developed could serve to keep book technologies working under the most challenging of conditions. A book designed to contain and retain many volumes of information in compact and reliable form over century and millennial time scales, under an unpredictably-variable range of conditions, would constitute an ideal invention for humanity’s future in the cosmos.

Finally, any book-type invention, self-contained, digitally active, and long-lasting, would deliver a permanent and transferrable product to its possessors and users. This transferability would confer on such an invention a distinct advantage over contemporary, conventional electronic books.

Summary of the Invention

The “glass book” as realized in the present invention is a sealed stack of slabs of durable, amorphous embedding material, such as glass, that strongly resists deterioration over millennium-long time scales. Embedded in the slabs are components of silicon and other insulative, semiconductive, and conductive elements and combinations of elements likewise durable. Among these components are energy-capturing and energy-converting power cells to provide electrical energy, charge-storage cells to store power-cell energy and issue electrical power for the book’s operation, computer microcircuits, and a durable, large-capacity, static, read-only, permanent memory subsystem. The permanent memory subsystem contains in digital form the texts, images, and other readable or user-presentable material for reading.  Also among these components is a digital display component embedded in the embedding material, and a memory resolution component for detecting, correcting, and healing errors in stored and communicated content of the read-only memory. Capacitance coupling, piezoelectric pressure coupling, or other means of tactile engagement through the surface slab enables a user to present touch commands to the book’s circuitry to activate and alter the contents of its display for reading from the book’s contents.  In an optical-interface embodiment, a camera and supporting circuitry and processing, all manufactured into one or more of the invention’s component layers, enable a user to present gestural commands likewise to the book’s circuitry. In a framing embodiment, the glass book is optionally formed with its power cells, storage cells, microcircuits, and memory embedded in an opaque frame surrounding a transparent window in which the digital display component is embedded. All of the book’s components are functionally interconnected. Such a book comprises in its content a highly-durable, broadly-accessible equivalent of an entire interlinked, nearly-indestructible library.