The Books

So, you’re a member of the Encyclopedia Foundation, not a popular group on Trantor. You just heard the news, that Hari Seldon was not executed by the Emperor, but that he managed to get himself – and you and everyone you know! – exiled to some dirt poor planet out way past any decent place to live!

You know some of the 100,000 people that are working on this project seem happy about it, but you, you are not. You see, you’re one of the ones who has to go to the Imperial Library and start making copies of punch cards and book spools, so as to have the start of the Encyclopedia Foundation!

The Galactic Empire is declining, after all, and to read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy”, they lost computer technology first! There are no USB Flash Drives, there is no Internet, and the only thing you are going to “download” is yourself into a chair! It’s time to sort through the “card catalogue” to find out what’s what!

And don’t think the Imperial Library staff is going to be much help. You don’t know it, but they are all agents of the Second Foundation, not a group known for having the best interests of the Encyclopedia Foundation at heart! At least not for the short term, anyway!

So what do you take? What books or book sets would you preserve, knowing that it is your responsibility to see to it that the knowledge of mankind is preserved?

Well, this is the question that we at the Encyclopedia Foundation here and now, on this planet, have to come up with answers to! Our mission says to preserve the knowledge of mankind, in a durable medium to last 10,000 years, but obviously we can’t preserve all books or book sets. True, any of us carries a more sophisticated computer in our pocket (iphone) than the whole Galactic Empire had, and more powerful than anything the Foundation Federation had, too.

But that makes no difference. We can access any data we like, we can find any book or book set we like, and we can even get a copy if we wish. Any book, that is. But not every book. There are too many. By Google’s estimate, which they admit is probably low, there are about 130,000,000 books out there. Neverminding the cost of purchasing copyright permissions for all of those – a problem Google has yet to surmount – there would be the matter of us having to afford so much metal.

If a book is – on average – 250 pages, and we can put 1,000 pages on a single metal plate, then we would need 32,500,000 metal plates. That’s a bit beyond our budget at this point, especially as there are issues of storage and issues of how they are all being printed.

Bear in mind, in Asimov’s book series, the Encyclopedists were to have gathered this information from the Imperial Library and had it packed and ready to go in about six months. We here at the Encyclopedia Foundation are estimating that whatever books we save, we are looking at closer to six years. And it will not be 130,000,000 books saved.

Fortunately for us – and mankind – it need not be. Not all books are worth as much as other books. There are the issues of fiction versus non-fiction, and obviously we will be leaning to non-fiction. Predominantly so. And then there is the fact that not every book – fiction or non-fiction – is as good as other similar books.

And there is this, neither the Encyclopedia Foundation of Terminus, or the Encyclopedia Foundation here, has to bring along instructions for how to sew a brightly colored sash for Golan Trevize to wear! It is sufficient to have a book on sewing, by the time Golan wishes a sash, they’ll have re-figured it out! Likewise, if one has books on the internal combustion engine and automotive design, one does not also needs the specs for every make and model that ever was.

And does one need both an Encyclopedia Britannica and a Colliers? One has more information than the other, so the other can be discarded. And of all the editions of Britannica, are there any superior to any other? Yes, there is, so we can narrow it down even further.

The suspense is ended on our “Goals” page, we have selected The Harvard Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge series and the 12th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And the complete works of William Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. This, we may confidently assert, would allow a culture to rebuild to early 20th century levels. And preserve much of Western Culture.

And some small equivalent kernel may well have been all that they could take to Terminus. We hope they could take more, though. We plan on preserving more. That first disc will just be the start.