My Library of the Future

I sometimes ponder what I would like my personal library to look like, in my future dream house. Lots of books, of course, and a few easy chairs. Nice woodwork. But a growing part of my library is ebooks, and how do you put ebooks where you can browse the spines, or pull books out at random to look at their covers? One of the things I like to do in my SF collection is to once in a while just look at the covers, and build a kind of gestalt feeling of all those wonderful stories gathered in one place.

So here's my plan. Along with all those paper books, I'll have a digital frame displaying a slideshow of the covers for all my ebooks. Understand, that's a stopgap measure, until the technology catches up with what I really want—a holographic display of the book images, arrayed sort of the way iTunes displays album covers when you're running a playlist. You'd be able to flip through the display with your fingertips, and if you find one you want to read right then, just pull it out of the holo. Sort of like this display at coverpop.com, only in full-sized full-holo. That action will cause the book to download, if necessary, into whatever magnificent reading device is current then, and open for reading. Sans dust mites.

The best of both worlds.