For more than four decades Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood's books have inspired readers around the world. During Atwood's formative years, books were her world.

"Where I was growing up, most of the time there were no libraries, no cinemas, no plays, no television; basically there were no people. But there were books inside the house," says Atwood, whose father ran a research station in the woods of northern Quebec. "So, as soon as I learned how to read, which was very early, I read the books that were there, from detective thrillers to non-fiction science books. My reading was very eclectic."

Atwood, who will be the keynote speaker at "The Future of Reading: Provocations, Predictions, Possibilities," a symposium at Rochester Institute of Technology running June 9-12, never thought something as basic as reading would be viewed in terms of a future. "It still is basic," she says, "we're not going to abandon the ability to decode text." But she - and many of the other speakers at the conference - recognizes that the text we decode will be delivered in new and different ways.

The conference will explore transformations in technology with new slate devices like the iPad, and cover a broad range of topics from the implications of information in the form of wikis, to changing reading habits and the vast amount of literature that will be available through Google Books.

Although she still begins her books in pencil or pen and never learned to touch type, Atwood says she can picture herself reading any kind of text anywhere. She has not yet tried an electronic reader, but she likes the idea of loading one with lots of books for traveling. If Google has its way, her e-reader will have no shortage of volumes.

Hundreds of years from now, the early 21st century might be viewed as a watershed moment in the history of reading. It may be said that that was the time when a company with the quaint name "Google" launched its quest to publish the entirety of the world's literature in electronic form. We may see books as unrelated objects lining library and books store shelves, but Google views them collectively as the corpus of human knowledge.

The idea of an electronic library containing all the world's books may conjure images of Jorge Luis Borges' brilliant story "The Library of Babel," with its endless labyrinth of bookshelves containing volumes of coherent and incoherent texts. Only Google's will be an endless labyrinth of computer servers.

"Our motto is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Notice, there's nothing there about the web," says Jon Orwant, engineering manager at Google and leader of the Boston Book Search team. "When people come to Google they have a latent question. The answer may be in a newspaper, a blog post, or a book. In 2005, we recognized that much of the world's information is available only in books."

Over the course of the project's first five years, 10 percent of the world's books have been scanned. Orwant, a conference speaker, expects the process to accelerate. "I have two kids, 4 and 6 years old," he says. "By the time they enter college, any book they ever want to get is going to be accessible online. It makes it easy to find information in books, easy to discover books that are out there, easy to read the books, and it enables some new forms of research."

For instance, Orwant points out that World War I was also called The Great War, and people only started to call it World War I when World War II started. He can now graph how often and when each of the phrases appeared in print.

"Prior to 1939 ‘The Great War' was the dominant phrase. After 1939 ‘World War I' was the dominant phrase," Orwant says. "But by graphing them it allowed me to zero in on that crossing point. It was 1939, but there were still dozens of books published prior to Hitler's invasion of Poland even into 1936 that were talking about World War I. That's a great tool for discovery, because now I can pull up those books and ask who was it who was actually prescient enough to realize that the big war that had just happened between 1914 and 1919 was in fact the first of two."

Orwant estimates that there are about 100 million books in the world, with about 10 percent currently in print and available. The majority of the other 90 percent are perhaps in a library somewhere. Some, he says, are out of copyright; most are out of print but in copyright. Many are obscure. For instance, a book about the genealogy of a region might not have much economic value, but it might prove useful to certain people.

While the primary purpose of Google Books' Library Project is for archiving and preservation, scanning costs up to $30 per book. Google has arranged to scan entire college libraries, millions of books, in and out of copyright. So the project is both altruistic and commercial. The more people spend time on Goggle properties, the more money the company makes through ads. And Google, in collaboration with publishers, will be selling electronic books in competition with Amazon.com's Kindle and other ereader services.

The project has many benefits. Every scanned book could be made available to blind or disabled people through special computer programs. And the information the books contain will be widely disseminated. Google wants to convert a computer terminal in every library in the United States to one that has access to all of the project's electronic books. (The library terminals will not have ads.)

As a novelist who makes her living selling books, the ease of copying digital books is a concern to Atwood. "Everybody's worried about piracy," says Atwood. "In the 19th Century there was no copyright and countries just stole books. In the Iron Curtain days both countries [the United States and the former Soviet Union] stole books. They took them and published them and the author made nothing."

When, in 2005, the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers filed suit against Google for copyright infringement, Orwant, an author, found himself both a plaintiff and a defendant in the case. The resulting settlement allowed Google to keep scanning, but it put the books' rights holders in control. They can allow their books to be made accessible for free, sell them through Google Books, or eliminate them from the system completely.

The power of reading has played a role in Atwood's fiction. She points out that what for some people is part of a fictional, dystopian future, for others is current reality.

"In ‘The Handmaid's Tale,' women are forbidden to read," says Atwood. "The rulers say we're not going to make that mistake again. In parts of the world people, not only women, have limited access to reading because they have limited access to education. Reading is age-specific. You can learn to do it quite easily when you're little. It's a lot harder to learn to read when you are grown up.

"We're not born with it," she says. "We are born with an innate language program that seems to switch on pretty early in life. We're not born with an innate ability to read. It's a leap. Our brains seem to build on a platform that's already there, but was originally for something else."

Atwood is somewhat skeptical about the value of the computer searches when it comes to research. "If you don't want to read it's fine. You look for a subject and there's 300,000 entries. Unless you know exactly what to key in, you're never going to find what you're looking for. My prediction: people are going to go back to reference libraries where there are people to help them."

Katherine Hayles, professor of literature at Duke University, isn't concerned about reading going digital; much of her reading has been digital for decades. Hayles studies electronic literature. With roots in 1960's computer-generated poetry (and deeper roots in typography combining visual and verbal elements), electronic literature took off as a literary form in the 1980's. It consists of text combined with animation, sound, graphics, and visual images. Most importantly, it doesn't exist outside of digital form.

"It's digital-born and has to be read on a computer to really experience the work as it was intended to be," says Hayles, who is currently completing a book, "How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies." Reading Hayles' on-line article "Electronic Literature: What Is It?" and sampling some of the many examples cited, you may feel that you have entered a parallel universe. By manipulating text, the speed with which it's delivered, and the aural and visual context it's delivered in, electronic literature controls how we get the message in a way traditional literature can't. From electronic literature, it is not too big a step to a different kind of reading that Hayles will discuss at RIT.

"I'm interested in a form of reading I call hyper-reading," says Hayles, "the kind of reading you do when you do a Google search, or scan a Wikipedia article. It's the opposite of close reading. I found that I spend about 40 percent of my reading time doing hyper-reading, reading bits of information, not reading every word, not even every line. Reading multiple sources, an e-mail within an e-mail - you lose a unitary context that guarantees meaning. You're not reading for meaning, which has traditionally been the most important thing."

This different way of reading - some might call it Attention Deficit Disorder on a massive scale - is pulling the rug out from under newspapers and magazines as they attempt to make the transition from print to the web while remaining financially solvent.

"Digital causes all industries to go to this existential crisis," says Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of "Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price." "You ask yourself, What business am I really in? What is a newspaper? What is television? What is a magazine when it's no longer defined by glossy pages mailed to you once a month?"

At Wired, Anderson and his staff have given web-based media a lot of thought. "Superficially, It offers distribution efficiencies; we're not shipping dead trees through the mail," says Anderson, also a speaker at the RIT conference. "In a much deeper sense it offers the opportunity to add interactivity, moving images, layers and depth, and a whole new dimension to the experience. We have to ask, What is the natural extension to the magazine? How much video makes it still a magazine? How much would be too much? Now we've basically turned it into a television."

Of course, all of this depends on the platform, and Anderson believes the right one may finally be here. "The arrival of the iPad and other tablets, is the first platform that many traditional magazine makers can get behind as a way to build on the skill and deliver on the experience that they already deliver in print, but enhance it with interactivity," he says.

Anderson's book, "Free," touched a nerve with journalists faced with free use of their content online and a diminishing job market. But Anderson's core idea was that media websites could give away some content to most customers while charging premium customers for greater access. Anderson calls it "freemium." "I argue that free content is the best way to market paid content," says Anderson. "Our digital magazine will follow the freemium model."

But outside of the high-tech world of Wired, traditional newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay alive. "Newspapers are very important," says Atwood. "I'm worried about the state that they're in because they are supposed to be more or less independent sources of information, and without them we're not going to function as a democracy."

Supplanting traditional newspapers in some areas are websites and blogs using free content written by amateurs. While conventional wisdom might suggest that standards are important for those who write, as the saying goes, "the first rough draft of history," Anderson is not concerned.

"When I look at the content that comes over my screen, it is a mix of ‘amateur' and ‘professional,'" says Anderson. "I have many narrow interests; those tend to be done by amateurs, whether it's my community or my robotics interests or a particular scientific interest. Then I'm reading about Baghdad or health care, and those tend to be done by professionals. They're both super high quality and super important to me. I really couldn't tell you one is better than the other, they just operate from an entirely different scale. Are daily newspapers in print form going to fade away? Some of them might, some already have."

But what does Anderson think of amateur effort when it comes to information about him? I asked him to check out his profile on Wikipedia, the widely used, user-generated online encyclopedia. He was clearly not impressed, but accentuated the positive.

"There will be other biographies that will be equally inadequate" he says. "I don't control my reputation. Reputation is pointillist, lots of dots, no single one of which tells the whole picture, but collectively they kind of approach a coherent image."

Wikipedia's reputation suffered in 2005 with the notorious John Seigenthaler incident. Seigenthaler, an assistant to Robert Kennedy in the 1960's, was said to have been a suspect in the assassinations of both Robert and John Kennedy, according to Wikipedia.

Wikis are programs that allow users to edit or create web pages with text, audio, pictures, and video, so, on websites like Wikipedia, there are no professional editors. The accusation against Seigenthaler, which was completely fabricated, remained on Wikipedia as a "fact" for four months.

Amit Ray, associate professor of English at RIT's College of Liberal Arts and a conference speaker, believes the issue of malicious tampering in wikis is ultimately about community. "If people had actually visited the [Seigenthaler] page, it would have been changed. On articles where you have a critical mass reading it, reversions occur in seconds." He points to a study in Nature comparing Wikipedia with the more established Encyclopedia Britannica. In the entries read, eight errors were found. There were four in each.

Ray, who has been researching wikis since 2004, is working on "Writing Babel," a book exploring authorship, authority, credit, and expertise in the age of the wiki. While most college professors tell their students to steer clear of Wikipedia and other internet sources, Ray believes wikis give us a more real view of events. He points to Wikileaks, an organization of dissidents who released the recent video of United States troops mistakenly targeting and killing innocent people in Iraq.

"Journalism has moved over the last 40 years from autonomous, independent and funded for its own ends as a public service - the fourth estate, a corrective to official voices where needed - to becoming one wing of a large entertainment-oriented complex," say Ray. "In that sense what we call journalism today, isn't really journalism. It's a kind of public relations related to other products that Fox and others are selling us. It's about the consumer, not about democracy or the public sphere or substantive differences in opinions, but based on detailed and thorough and constant market testing, telling you what you want.

"In wikis you have that community that cares enough to debate things and to argue over it, and to settle upon what's called the Wikipedia principle of neutral point of view," Ray says. "You get something that steers clear of over-editorializing."

While we may take for granted that information in an encyclopedia should come from experts, there are precedents for democratic participation in authoritative works. The Oxford English Dictionary involved tens of thousands of collaborators sending in examples of word usages and their meanings over time. Still, there is a nagging feeling that we are moving into a Wild West era in a crucial component of society.

"You have gatekeepers, peers, editors, readers who vet a particular work before it reaches that state of publication," says Ray. "In creating an information environment that eclipses all that strata, of course you're going to have concerns. A lot of the anxieties that we're feeling now were anxieties that were felt in the century following the advent of the printing press. In this morass of information, where is credibility? Where does authority lie?"

Every Wikipedia entry, Ray points out, has an edit section and a talk page. He believes readers can assess the quality of an entry by the discussion around the page. And each entry has a history section containing every change from the first iteration to the present one.

"We're always seeking out the new as opposed to reflecting on the past, and when the past does come into the present it's as pastiche, collage, re-mix, etc. that's about the present, not necessarily the past," says Ray. "In that sense, Wikipedia at this time represents the greatest archive of human experience that currently exists in 271 languages, and in projects that go well beyond the encyclopedia part."

In Ray's view, if you want to know about a current subject like health-care reform, there is no better place to find a comprehensive, documented, and archived representation than on Wikipedia. "It's growing in real time, and integrating daily events as they occur."

No matter how steeped in tradition or oriented to the future, the conference speakers agree on one thing: the paper book is still very much a viable platform.

"I don't think books will disappear, at least not in my lifetime," says Hayles. "The book as a physical object has been well designed. But all the obstacles to reading with a digital device can be solved. Any digital device has the tremendous advantage of storage. You can take an almost unlimited number of books when you travel."

"Look at what the Kindle has done to books," says Anderson. "Has it cannibalized physical books? I think it's done less cannibalizing and more growing the pie, bringing more books into people's lives because it's convenient, it's flexible. They can read on impulse. Are books in print going to fade away? Probably not in my lifetime. Will they be the predominant way most people get books? Maybe not, but I think there will still be a significant minority of people who want the traditional hardcover to give as a gift, to put on their shelf, to have by their bedside to curl up with.

"I've got five kids," Anderson continues. "They're the children of the editor of Wired magazine, so you can imagine what kind of life they grew up in. Their relationship with physical books is unchanged from my own. They love books. That tells me there's something transcendental about a physical book. It's not an inadequate delivery mechanism but it's actually a lovely artifact. I have confidence that physical books will be with us for a long time."

But another concern involving digital books is the obsolescence of media. Computers have been widely used for just a few decades, yet Google's Orwant already has many outmoded hard discs and floppy discs in his basement. "There's always a danger that when you burn something into a medium, you're not going to be able to read it later. That's something I worry about a lot. [Google Books] is kind of all the world's knowledge. We want to see ourselves as stewards of it. The worst thing we could do is structure it or store it in such a way that it becomes inaccessible to future generations."

Technical obsolescence is an even larger problem for electronic literature that does not exist in physical space. "Works that are really brilliant become unplayable on updated platforms," says Hayles, "so the Library of Congress has been working with the Electronic Literature Organization to identify 300 works that they will then use their resources to keep updated and playable."

Atwood has more basic concerns about a digital future of reading: solar flares, internet overload, and electricity shortages. "Think of what a computer is and what it runs on and what interferes with it," says Atwood. "What do you do in an electrical storm? If you're smart you'll unplug it, because one sharp crack of electricity can wipe your whole thing and there goes your life. Really, what people ought to be thinking about is improving the grid and alternate sources of energy. Where that's going to come from?

"You can always get a hammer and chisel and start writing things on the walls," Atwood says. "Do away with the cheap, available energy supply and it's a whole different set of problems. And you'll be going through the rubbish heap, looking for discarded printed texts, because guess what? Once they're there, all you need is sunlight."

Future of Reading Symposium

Wednesday-Saturday, June 9-12

Rochester Institute of Technology, 1 Lomb Memorial Drive

$295, $150 (student with ID)| http://futureofreading.cias.rit.edu/2010/