This is a draft of an autobiography to be written around 2010. Obviously it is fiction as this is 2008 at the moment. The outline may turn out to be credible. Last year I did a course on life writing and it was suggested I study some Kurt Vonnegut. In "Timequake" he imagines he is still alive in 2010, aged 88 or 98 "if you want to count the rerun". This was written in 1996 so imagining a couple of years is not so much of a stretch.

Time travel is part of the scope as it makes it easier to describe some aspects of what seems to be happening. Currently a book collection would be called "Hello Spiders" as most of my writing is scattered and coherence is not obvious. Search engines may make sense of some of it with other sources for occasional purposes.

It seems unlikely that text about the going of "the book" could turn out to be a book in itself. There could be an outline however, or a guide to how to create another one. The idea came from reading "The Coming of the Book" by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin , published by Verso, London in 1984. Fortunately this has been scanned by Google Books but it misses out the introduction where it is described how slow the writing process was before email.

It is possible to imaginre that trade shows will be different. I am not sure if the web will take over more of their role. Recently I seem to be thinking of a year of events as quite close together and with several overlaps. As if one would be better closer to another. So I am thinking about a general purpose show called "Excellence in Total Communications". This will start out in Earl's Court based on the Bookfair and the Print show in the autumn. "Communications" is the new word for the London College of Printing and "Total" is now part of the description for the South Print occasion. Earl's Court could be laid out with the print technology at the back, the books upfront and the web technology in the middle. The agents could have the entire upstairs.

Connecting with the Online Information and BETT events could take longer but by 2010 there could be one event, maybe at Excel with digital on one side and analog on the other. The publishers could choose where to be. Certainly the same names are cropping up at both Online and the Bookfair. The schools are going digital, maybe because of how students communicate anyway.

I am placing this on the Internet Express site as this is an imagined space somewhere near Exeter where I live. Actual web awareness is also an exercise in time travel.

Will Pollard email