One possible future for literature goes like this:

          Every person owns a computerized book - the shape and size of an average book - which can be used to download any digital information.  This book will be so flexible that the reader will be able to change the font, font-size - color of text and background to their liking.
          The books to be downloaded will be available from both public and private libraries.  All books which exist in the public library will be digitally available, and there will be private libraries - private collections of esoteric texts, publisher's stables, and even libraries erected by individual authors.  From these libraries - some with nominal membership fees - you will be able to download books for a one month period (extensions available), or, you can choose to purchase the book, to keep with you always.  The file will be encoded so that the book in question will only be available to your computerized book - and cannot be transferred to another.
          Being digital information - the book will include not only text, but illustrations, pictures, even movies, and sound.  For instance, you can choose to read the text yourself, have the text read to you by the author or some professional actor, and view visual representations of the text, from professionally wrought illustrations and photographs to full-blown movies, as well as 3-D environments.  Plus author interviews, reviews, companion pieces, and excerpts from past and forthcoming books.
          Literature will become the culmination of the arts.

          How will this effect the writing of literature?  Every sentence written, every line of every poem, will succomb to the digital possibilities of the text.  Literature as pure entertainment has not even been explored yet.  So literature itself will become more underground - more abstract and detached from the human.  Literature will become that which cannot be presented as literature.  The disappearance of literature is not only the extinction of the human race personified, it precedes and facilitates this extinction.
          Literature must, therefore, write to that period of non-existence, so that we can avoid it, so that we can weather it, and come back around to being.

[first presented _arc.hive_, June 2003]