书籍和互联网：你能看出它们的关联嘛？”_大学英语阅读

书籍和互联网：你能看出它们的关联嘛？”

　　The distinction between the ebook/webpage, webpage/ebook is not a material one. In technological terms they are exactly the same thing. But when McGuire first mooted his argument on Twitter in April last year my response likely mirrors the response of many book readers, Books are researched, written, edited, published, marketed and hence paid for. The internet is ego noise, hence free. The distinction many of us draw between a book and a webpage is one of quality and hence of value. The real question raised by McGuires argument is whether we continue to value ebooks as books, or as webpages. Books are something we pay for. Webpages are things we read for free. Which model will win out?

　　Unless you are one of the very small number of people whose fortunes rest upon the outdated business model of publishing, you should hope that the latter wins. Because this is about a much bigger issue than how writers and editors get paid for the valuable work they do. For hundreds of years weve been slowly expanding the reach of human knowledge, both in terms of what we know and how many of us know it. Today we take a resource like Wikipedia for granted but compare it with the situation of only a few decades ago, when the majority of the population had lacked easy access to such knowledge. The benefits of expanding access to knowledge, both social and economic, are incalculable.

　　Now we stand at the threshold of possibly the most revolutionary advances in human history. The combined technologies of the internet HTML webpages, ebooks, search technology, social media and many more are very close to making all human knowledge accessible to all people for free. Even the short-term consequences of this advance are hard to envisage, and in the long term it has the potential to improve our future as much as the invention of the printing press improved our past and present.