In the past twenty years, the progress of science and technology has brought earth-shaking changes to human life. People's way of thinking and behavior, including writing, reading and communication, have changed to the surprise of the previous generation, and this change snowballs faster and faster. Eight years ago, 1997 had 630,000 netizens and nearly 300,000 computers connected to the Internet. By the end of June this year, the total number of netizens had reached 654.38+003 billion, an increase of 654.38+08.4% over the same period last year. There are 45.6 million computers connected to the Internet (according to the 6th report of China Internet Network Information Center/kloc-0). The report also released some interesting data: 65438+80% netizens are between the ages of 08 and 50; Surf the Internet for an average of 4.2 days a week, *** 14 hours; The main purpose of surfing the Internet is to obtain information, accounting for 37.8%, and to learn and browse knowledge, accounting for 10.4%. In terms of obtaining information, 83% of netizens refer to obtaining news. In other words, nearly 50 million people (654.38+0.05 million people × (37.8%+654.38+00.4%) read online regularly or completely. At this rate of development, 20 years later, how many people, 500 million? Billion? Will often or completely read online! Twenty years later, we will enter the era of e-books. With the help of all kinds of readers-mobile phones, PDA's, all kinds of electronic products that have not been invented yet-the shape can be made into newspapers, magazines and books, or it can be very different. With the help of the Internet-wired or wireless, readers can subscribe (download) newspapers and magazines they want to read at will (of course, they have to pay), read this today, read that tomorrow, and even do it themselves-through search engines and pages. Publishing houses no longer print and sell paper books, but produce data "texts". Readers go to traditional bookstores or online bookstores to buy what they want to read-data and texts stored in disks, CDs or other media, import them into readers, or buy (download) "books" directly from publishers through the network. Of course, if you want paper books, you can print and bind one separately through a high-speed printer. Publishers don't have to worry about the increase in inventory, and the demand for paper will be greatly reduced. In this way, trees are lucky, the environment is lucky and human beings are happy. The future library is likely to be no longer full of bookshelves, but a mass storage database.