by Skip DeKades
November 19, 2028 — Barnes & Noble, the brick-and-mortar book chain that has been losing business to Amazon’s popular Book-to-Brain service, announced yesterday that it is filing Chapter 11 and will likely liquidate its assets.
Barnes & Noble, which has only a few remaining stores operating nationwide, was itself once a new-fangled powerhouse that drove most independent bookstores out of existence. It is now the victim of the post-literature era. Most people no longer read, but instead simply download text from Amazon into the hippocampus.
The downloads include analysis of the texts so that people understand the deeper meaning behind them. A college student can download Moby Dick into his or her brain, and write an essay on the novel in a literature class, without ever having to crack open a book.
The Book-to-Brain service is credited with largely wiping out illiteracy in most of the developing world, as well as reducing deforestation and giving people more time to goof off.
. at 12:44 pm |
[...] in British elementary schools. The schools in 2022 eliminated basic reading from its curriculum, allowing students to simply download stories directly to their brains. They can also now use voice-to-text speech for writing [...]
. at 1:13 pm |
LOL! Oh and what a ‘chain’ B&N was—destroying the fabric of diversity represented by independent bookstores.