I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

We are on our way to blockchains as the fabric of society - the system for what we own (assets), who we are (identity), how we make decisions (governance), and more in an increasingly digital world. It's going to be a wild ride.

I think it would be impossible not to be an Internet kid, coming from New Zealand, because culturally it's a little barren.

Sergey Brin has said to me, like, 10 times now, 'Why do you bother doing books? Why don't you just put all this stuff on the Internet?' It's because 10 years from now, my book will still be sitting on someone's coffee table or in a waiting room.

I love technology.