Microsoft isn’t the only one working closely with the U.S. spying machine. Google has been doing it for years. The company’s roots are tied to the CIA, and it has worked with the NSA as well.

Here’s a sign of how vital Google has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the NSA…

This mixing of military, police, government, public education, business and consumer-facing systems – all funnelled through Google – continues to raise alarms.

Is it just me, or is it unnerving that companies are allying themselves closer with the military?

Books have changed in the digital age. Although plenty of people still read paper books, or ‘pBooks’, eBooks are here to stay. Past prognosticators foretold the rise of the Future Book, but that future is different than they thought.

…We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book…

It’s an interesting read. Books themselves haven’t changed much, but a lot of things around books have.