About the Author

Nicholas Negroponte is the author of the bestseller Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Negroponte is the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, which he directed for its first 20 years. A graduate of MIT, Negroponte is considered a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design. He gave the first TED talk in 1984 and has given over a dozen more since. He founded the non-profit One Laptop per Child, which deployed $1 billion of laptops for primary education in the developing world.

Reviews

"The finest, most understandable explanation of the digital revolution to date....Being Digital is a visionary work, written by one of this planet's masters of media."--The Christian Science Monitor

"Being Digital flows from the pen (or cursor) of a wizard who is himself helping to create the new cosmos into which we are hurtling....To read Being Digital is to enter the future it describes."--The New York Times Book Review

Negroponte, popular columnist for Wired magazine and founding director for the MIT Media Lab, describes how advancements in computer technology and telecommunications will transform workplaces, households, and educational institutions. He explains how this revolution will change the way we live, think, and interact with one another and with technology and foresees some mind-boggling challenges that lie ahead in developing truly global systems for delivering multimedia and other forms of digitally based information. Negroponte characterizes the development of future information delivery systems as a battle between atoms, the components of books and other physical resources, and bits, the basic building blocks of information. In 1991, he predicted the eventual demise of libraries, those vast storehouses of atoms, in favor of bit-based purveyors of information. An important work for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/94.]-Joe Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago