After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they've agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download the book for free here, or above.

on the Kindle

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher ... Each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.

A machine that electronically stores 2.5 million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven minutes is to be launched early next year. It prints in any language and has an upper limit of 550 pages.