I've just Googled the word 'eBook' and was somewhat astonished to see the result. Not the actual web addresses, but the number of results there were, 106,000,000 to be precise, and at 106m, not 106,000,010, but 106m it is indeed a precise number.

That number led me to another thought. How many people own a Kindle?

Released on November 19th, 2007, the Kindle has taken the literary world by storm. Specific sales information is not available, but Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com said at a 2010 shareholder's meeting that, 'millions of people now own Kindles.' That's an astonishing feat in such a short period of time. It has to be the fastest growing sales for any electronic device ever.

This sales information then led me to wonder what was next. What sort of device would come from the common use of an eReader to read an eBook? Well, as many people would rather consult an online medical repository, maybe medical eBooks will become popular. Then it occurred to me that perhaps an eDevice will be invented that can diagnose our medical symptoms. We wake up in the morning feeling groggy, out comes the eMedDevice and we plug it into our implanted bio-output port and, hey-presto, we have a diagnosis- too much wine the night before.

At this rate, in the not-too-distant-future, I can see that eBook readers, or rather their descendents, will soon be the must have device for the emergency services. Ambulance crews will arrive on the scene and instead of consulting a Doctor they will simply plug their eMedDevice into the patient and the eMedDevice into the mobile medicine dispenser and press the start button. The eMedDevice will sort the patient out and the ambulance crew can have a coffee break.

You may well laugh, but bear in mind how far medicine has advanced since the 2nd World War alone. Ultrasound was used as early as 1949 to access the thickness of bowel tissue. That was just over sixty years ago. Ultrasound is used this day and age to check the status of unborn children, to check if your vital organs are functioning and for many more things as well.

Clearly if we in this day and age use a Kindle to store and read thousands of books, then it becomes apparent that this sort of computing capability can only mean that human beings have a never ending thirst for knowledge. With hand held devices becoming smaller and smaller and the information they carry becoming larger and larger, it seems inevitable that at some point a device will be created that is small enough to implant into a human, but can store the sum of all human knowledge, and then some. It was reported in January 2012 that IBM scientists had created the world's smallest storage device, just 12 atoms in size. The scientists needed just 12 atoms per bit of information and were able to squeeze a whole byte into just 96 atoms. Then they were able to code the IBM motto "Think" by programming this block of atoms to store the five letters.

So, as we go about our daily business we will have a device inside us that will continually monitor our health, check the Stock Market, link to our home computer to place an order for groceries and email our friends and relatives as we walk along the sidewalk admiring the spring sunshine. Far fetched? Well think on this, how often do you use email to contact friends, family or colleagues, once a month, once a day or even several times a day? How often do you write, physically, write a letter to someone you know? I've not written a letter in at least twenty years. Electronic information has dominated our lives for a very long time and is as natural to us today as receiving a letter in the post was twenty years ago. The use of electronic information by humans means that at some point, it will not just be inevitable, but wholly desired to be connected electronically to as many people, homes, services, institutions and leisure facilities as humanly and electronically possible. And at that point, not only will Big Brother be watching you but so will the rest of the Human race.

Copyright (c) Tom Kane 2011