The Future of the Book

The future of the book in school or outside of school is a service. You will go to the phone, or use some other means of announcing your interest, and say "The history of Egyptian arithmetic" and that you know a  little Sanskrit and a lot of French and a lot of this and that and, "Please send me the latest." You will receive in an hour or so a package with all the latest studies on Egyptian arithmetic from every journal in the world, and custom-made for your resources and your means. The idea of just having mass-produced books the same for every one, and just going out and buying one, is automatically liquidated by Xerox. Xerox makes the book into a service industry--information service--and entirely tailor-made, custom-built.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age, 

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times: 

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970