I think I'm going to have to take a bit of a different slant on this week's question, since I'm not convinced that the time period you choose to travel to (past or future) would make much of a difference at all, other than that people after 1990 or so might relate to you a bit more.
If I had to go back, or forward, in time then, and tell people one thing about the future of the book and reading it would be this: it's not going anywhere, and it never has. Reading, or the study of abstract symbols manifested in some visible way to render ideas, has been around almost as long as we have. Sure, we've moved from cave art to complex vocabularies, and from writing on walls and buildings to writing on computer tablets. And hey, maybe one day scientists will invent a way to beam images directly into our brains, or modern languages as we know them will evolve to the point that they become unrecognizable to those of us who lived in 2016. But I still don't believe that much will have changed.
Expressing ourselves and relaying our stories is an intrinsic part of the human condition, and we will always want to be able to understand those stories, regardless of format.
Well said Kara! I'm with you on this one. Everything has changed and nothing has changed.
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