A culture has evolved to embrace a technology where nearly every person on earth is hooked up to instant information. Books and other media have been eliminated or dismissed. What has resulted is a rather humorless culture where most people are about the same. One young man, one of the few that for some reason (a car accident, I guess) was left with the inability to hook up to the huge knowledge web. He is seen as retarded by his peers. Only the man who raised him really shows him kindness. We also find out along the way that only certain books could be scanned and the program had the others destroyed. The main character begins to investigate when a computer virus kills his guardian and begins to infest others (they seem to die of a kind of data overload). He realizes that the only hope for humanity is to shut down the program. This is hard because the program has gained an almost human status with all the pitfalls that this entails. He has a friendship with a young woman who is sympathetic to his feelings but who feels that the program is still the right way to make things better. This is quite interesting as we do miniaturization of computer produces (most recently, those glasses that contain a visual monitor). Will we someday implant a device that allows us to retrieve anything from the internet. It would probably be the end of Jeopardy.