The halls and rooms on the upper floors are for hobbies. Here people make pottery, draw and paint pictures, build model airplanes, or play musical instruments. There are teachers to help you with every hobby.

A very popular room is the library. There are no books. The floor is shaped into tables and benches. Built into these tables are hundreds of vision phones. The books, films, and newspapers are all stored in the library computer.

First you dial the library index. This file contains all the books that have ever been written. It does not matter whether they were first written in Chinese or French. They will be here, translated into English. There is also an index of films and newspapers. You could spend all day watching comics, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.

Note: You want to understand the central issue of the modern era? Every single thing described here—perhaps with the exception of making pottery and building model airplanes—is a product offered by Google. And the main reason for that is because they’re the only ones rich enough to fight the copyright battles to make these things accessible. Libraries are stuck in the past in part because they can’t break copyright law to do exactly what Hoyle suggests: store these digital copies on their own servers and make them available to everyone. Google can. Thusly, you don’t have your Sports and Social Centers because the information that was once vital to a library is now available on your vision desk at home.