Aboutthebook The success of the information society The rapid progress of the “information society” in the past decade has been made possible by the removal of many technical barriers. Producing, storing, and transporting information in large quantities are no longer signi?cant problems. Producing on-line, digitized information is no longer a problem. Ever more of our commercial, scienti?c and personal information exchanges happen on-line in digital form. In the professional domain, near 100% of all o?ce documents areproducedindigitalform(evenifafterwardstheyaredistributedinpaper form), large parts of the scienti?c discourse are now taking place in digital form (with physics, computer science and astronomy taking a leading role). In the public domain, newspapers are available on-line, an increasing number of radio and television stations o?er their material on-line in streaming form and e-government is an important theme for public administration. Even in the personal area, information is rapidly moving on-line: sales of digital cameras are now higher then for analogue cameras, e-mail and on-line chat have become important channels for maintaining social relations and for personal entertainment the digital DVD is rapidly replacing the analogue video tape. Compact disk (itself already digital) is under serious pressure from on-line music in MP3 format from a variety of sources. In short: p- ductionofon-lineinformationisnowthenorminvirtuallyallareasofourlife. Storing such information in the required volumes is also no longer a problem.