“The fact that we already have virtual robots standing in for retail clerks, and cell phones that read out loud, is evidence that the world is about to chance in even more fantastical ways”
– From Gary Wolf’s illuminating piece on futurist and singularity guru Ray Kurzweil in the April 2008 issue of Wired.
How does Kurzweil fit into the book world? He is basically the godfather of digitization; his inventions include the first omni-font optical character recognition (a computer program capable of recognizing text printed in any normal font), the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first flat-bed scanner, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer.