The future of books

The other day I was a little worried about the future of literature so I ordered a time machine from Amazon (ironic, I know) and I got in it and pressed all the right buttons and went into the future, to see how the next 100 years would shape up for that thing we know as the 'book'. Here are the main years to look out for:

2015 The 'Not the Mantel' Prize is launched to give the 50 per cent of writers who aren't Hilary Mantel a chance of winning a prize. Hilary Mantel wins the prize.

2017 Kim Kardashian's memoir Living the Dream makes it onto the school curriculum to encourage children to read. Illiteracy levels spike.

2018 There are now eighteen Twitter users left in the world who don't have the word 'writer' in their bio.

2020 Nanotechnology makes it possible for e-readers to make use of digitised paper. They start looking more and more like actual books.

2021 Amazon suffers a system failure when someone posts a grammatically-correct review.

2022 A mathematician devises the formula for the perfect literary novel. It is titled The Luxury of Despair and it is set in Weimar Germany.

2023 The same mathematician devises the formula for the perfect commercial thriller. It is titled Bones in the Snow.

2025 The X-box game of Mrs Dalloway is a bit of a flop.

2026 People miss actual books. Start buying them again. But mainly they just read them on their digitised contact lenses.

2029 There is a documentary on BBC 5 looking at the late noughties featuring footage of big clunky Kindles with a Lady Gaga soundtrack over it and people across the land laugh at how they used to read.

2030 There is another new cover for Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. This one features a naked supermodel sticking her finger into a jam jar while ringing a bell, in a retro style.

2033 The last library closes. Civilization crumbles. Cannibalism is back in vogue as a way to combat the population crisis and food shortage all at once.

2041 They successfully find the sequence for Shakespeare's DNA and bring William Shakespeare back to life. There is considerable disappointment when he ends up working for a moderately successful internet marketing company based in Solihull.

2049 No-one writes in silly words made of capital letters anymore, like their grandparents used to. No-one talks about rolling on the floor laughing unless they are rolling on the floor laughing. Which is never.

2050 There is a major reassessment of the work of E L James. Her work is heralded as a great feminist critique of the social patriarchy and amoral capitalist values of her time.

2053 Oprah Winfrey is very old.

2063 There is a massive trend for historical fiction. The bestselling book of 2063 is Maybelline Blythe's moving 2013 set romance I Married an IT Consultant.

2064 Oprah Winfrey is even older now. She admits to taking performance-enhancing drugs.

2065 Books suffer a serious decline due to the fact that Google funded 'librarian' robots have suffered a malfunction and taken over and killed eighty-five per cent of the book industry. Only the agents survive, through a process of skilful negotiation and fine attention to small print.

2100 Robots develop a taste for literature. They design a piece of software that makes even agents redundant. It can churn out book after book after book, following the exact same pre-programmed pattern. They call this software Dan Brown.

2113 The last remaining rag-tag band of human survivors set up a small settlement in a field in Hay-on-Wye. They sit around the fire every night, telling the most wonderful stories. 'Storytelling is part of us' says one man, with a long beard. 'We are humans, we are never going to lose that.'

So, there you go. The next 100 years.