One of the popular geeky topics over the past decade has been to compare the Internet to the printing press. The printing press brought about a massive cultural revolution affecting all aspects of life, such as government, religion, and literature.

It took a long time for this change to take effect and this month we celebrated the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, the second most published book in the world, which Janet Murray traces to the invention of the printing press and hails as the beginning of the European novel in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck.