Jon Evans has a thought-provoking post on The Buffet Effect.  What happens when the limitations are no longer how much is out there but how much can you handle?

I’m going to play around with his corollary of Sturgeon’s Law.  10% of everything is not crud.  Let’s say that 1% of that is quite good (I’m thinking an 8 or better on a scale of 1 to 10), not necessarily life-changing but a good, fun/instructive/inspirational read.  I’m assuming here that these are good books for me – there may be a tome on pet etiquette or a horror novel out there that makes aficionados weep with wonderment, but I’m not going to be reading those.  Using Wikipedia’s Books published per country per year and some guesswork for slimming that down to only English books, I get about 400’000 books published per year.  400’000 * 0.10 = 40,000 not crud books.  1% of that is 400 good books published per year. 

If I read a book a day, reading only new and good books, I will still fall behind at the rate of 40 good books per year.  Throw in all the books published in the last 400 years or so and I will never catch up.  

Of course I’d need a way of ensuring that I only read good books.  If I read one book out of ten that I’d rate below an 8, I’m really going to fall behind.  Then there’s all the non-book stuff I read: blogs, newsletters, magazines, and so on. 

This is not a new problem.  I remember reading Heinlein’s concerns about this before personal computers came along (and I think he may have been referencing something even older). 

I see this as a tremendous opportunity for some company to do for filtering what Google has done for search.  What if there were a way to guarantee that everything I read is a good read?  Rather than stumbling through a dozen textbooks looking for a comprehensible explanation for a concept, what if there were a way for a filtering engine to find an explanation that’s tailored to my understanding of the subject matter? 

The danger is that filtering engines would be too thorough.  What happens when the book I’d enjoy the most is filtered away so that I never read that fascinating tome of pet etiquette and have my life turned around?  What happens when all the news I read is set up to confirm my biases?  Will we wind up living in our own little bubbles of subjective reality? 

If you want more thoughts on this kind of thing, read up on The Long Tail.

(On a totally unrelated note, when I read the title of the post this is the song that went through my head.)