The war of the libraries

Source Summary

Sorting books in the home library, I stumbled upon the catalog of a photographic exhibition about libraries, from thirty years ago (1996), in which the art historian Francesc Miralles Bofarull, in the introductory text, goes back to the prehistory of the book, when the cities of Alexandria and Pergamon competed for who had the best library. The book was a new, cutting-edge technology, synonymous with innovation, power, knowledge, and information. It was the AI of its time. If AI is dedicated to collecting, processing, and exploiting all millennial bookish information, the books of those times fixed for the present and posterity all preceding oral knowledge.