My Book! ‘The Idea Machine’ Is Almost Here

A Book about Books: How They Helped Create Our World and Still Shape Our Future

I’ve been working on a project for more than a decade now, and the completion is finally in view. Ten-plus years ago I had an idea to write a book about books. I knew it would be a history, and I knew of several episodes I wanted to cover. I also knew I was too ignorant to tackle it in a flurry. I had a lot of pieces to put together.

Once I began investigating in earnest, my ignorance only grew. Hello, human condition! Why don’t you stay awhile? . . . Oh, that’s unavoidable, you say? Good thing I love research. My blindspots still outnumber the stuff I’ve nailed down, but I do have a finished book covering what I understand. What’s more, I think it’s a unique take that anyone who digs books will love.

But back up a bit.

The Big Idea

Once I had enough socked away in my mental filing cabinet, scribbled in the margins of books and papers, sketched in notes and outlines, I had to formulate a thesis that could give the book necessary shape and direction, that could determine what details were in and which were out—not to mention what else I still needed to learn.

It’s not true that every story needs an argument, but mine did. Thankfully, it emerged as I worked. It was painfully slow at first but then careened into view like Hemingway’s explanation of going bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly.” When the central idea dropped in place, all the loose pieces banging around in the box slid into position.

The upshot? I argue the book is more than a container for content. It’s a dynamic information technology that enables human beings to transcend the natural human limits of memory, distance, time, and cognition. Hence the title: The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. Books are tools with which we shape ourselves and our world.

My book! The Idea Machine, coming November 2025 from Prometheus.

There are several ways books accomplish this feat, but here are a few to introduce the general idea:

1. Books externalize thought. They take fleeting, interior mental material and give it durable, visible shape and substance.

2. Books preserve ideas across time. Once written, an idea can influence readers not just in the present, but across generations.

3. Books allow for editing, arrangement, and recombination. These affordances improve the clarity of ideas and support extended cognitive engagement—not only for encoding ideas as writers, but also decoding them as readers.

4. Books facilitate intellectual scaling. Ideas can be transported, shared, indexed, analyzed, compared, critiqued, and combined—at scales unmatchable by oral cultures.

Each of these and other features depend not so much on the content of the book alone but also its format. Books are both software and hardware, and it’s the combination that matters to the advancement of human culture, knowledge, and civilization. Consider just one example.

Plato’s Research Engine

While a surface reading of Plato’s Phaedrus might indicate the philosopher inherited his mentor Socrates’s supposed skepticism of writing, he nonetheless became a prolific user of books and advocate for their utility. Biographical details reveal Plato’s

• acquisition of expensive books, including Pythagorean and poetic writings;

• founding of the Academy, where books were read aloud, debated, and copied; and

• creation of a substantial library for the Academy that facilitated philosophical inquiry.

Plato didn’t simply read for inspiration and entertainment—though he certainly did so, despite barring poets from his ideal society. He used books to compare arguments, cite authorities, and preserve nuanced trains of thought that might otherwise be lost. One scholar called the library he built at the Academy his “research engine.”

Books were essential to shaping Plato’s philosophical method. They provided access to a diverse range of voices from different disciplines and eras. They structured and recorded chains of reasoning. And they provided the raw material for the collaborative intellectual work of his community.

The result was a sustained tradition of thought that deeply influenced Western philosophy and education. Without books, the Academy’s intellectual inheritance would have vanished with its members. Maybe even more central to my point: Without books there would have been no intellectual inheritance to begin with because Plato and his students would have had nothing to work with.

Plato’s philosophical legacy didn’t just rest on great ideas; it rested on access to, use of, and preservation through books.

An Essential Technology

Once you see these and other patterns in action you can explain so much more, including the cultural impact of people as disparate as St. Paul and St. Augustine, desert monastics and Roman emperors, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X.

You can even see how we got the Internet and generative AI tools like large language models—both of which are rooted in the history of the book. From the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, and into the present era, the history of the book is the story of how human societies harnessed the power of information to grow and thrive.

There’s plenty of disruption and drama along the way, which gives The Idea Machine all the conflict necessary for (hopefully) a riveting read. C.S. Lewis once said he was the product of endless books. Having digested a massive swath of the book’s history, I can say that’s true for all of us—whether we know it or not. Our world would look nothing like it does if the book hadn’t been a part of it.

Coming This Fall

And now this little project of mine is nearly complete! The copyeditor is currently wearing out her red pencil, and early plans for promotion are coming into view. The book hits stores November 18, 2025. You can preorder it now from retailers such as Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

I’m excited to finally share more about it, but I can’t wait to share the book itself with you on publication day. Before then, I’d like to ask a favor: If this concept resonates with you, if you love books about books, if you love history, if you love the story of ideas, the story of tech, the story of cultural change and cultural heroes, consider preordering The Idea Machine.

Bookstores base their interest on a book by prepublication demand, so preorders help a book like mine succeed; without sufficient early demand, bookstores invest their inventory dollars on other titles. So, if you’re able to preorder The Idea Machine and do so, I’ll do cartwheels, several of them.

Even better than cartwheels, I’m putting together some preorder reward packages for anyone who buys in advance of the November publication date, the earlier the better. I’m still working on the details of those packages, so save your receipt and I’ll happily send you the goods.

In the meantime, I’m also thrilled to say I’ll be joining

Ruth Gaskovski

and

Peco

this weekend for a conversation on Reading in the Digital Age. They’ve graciously opened the event to the public, so you can listen in as we talk about a few of the ideas in this book—and plenty more besides. Check here for details.

Finally, I’d love to hear what you think about The Idea Machine. Share your thoughts below.

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