I spilled my soda water onto the console of the janky time machine and the temporal coordinate regulator shorted out. Not before jolting me to an not-too-far-off adjacent future where paper doesn’t exist.

I figured I’d go find a book to read while the console dried off. Not a book store in sight. No paper mail. No cardboard boxes. Pulp was truly fiction in this reality after plastics became edible and nutritious (no longer an environmental menace), there was a permanent moratorium on the production of paper products and all existing paper books were rounded up and permanently rehoused at the Guttenberg archival wing next to the global seed vault in Svalbard.

Meanwhile, for those feeling nostalgic for leatherbound, paper-filled tomes, you can buy a perfume for electronic devices that give it that old book smell.