Many years ago, Howard Rheingold, who was one of the first people to understand the social potential of cyberspace, posed an interesting question: 'Where is the Library of Congress, when it's on your laptop?' To most people at the time, it seemed a meaningless question. What lay behind it, however, was an attempt to think through a profound consequence of a networked society - what Frances Cairncross later dubbed 'the death of distance'.

In the old days, libraries were society's only repositories for the information and knowledge embodied in books. To get at the knowledge, you had to go to make the physical journey to where it was stored. That was the basis of our ancient universities - they housed scholars and books, and to access either, students had to journey to where they were.

Rheingold's question was about how that would change when everything that had ever been printed was available online. Only a few people took the bait. One was Eli Noam, a Columbia scholar who published a startling paper, Electronics and the Dim Future of the University , in the October 1995 issue of the journal Science.

But for the most part, Rheingold was ignored because the prospect of universal digitalisation seemed so remote. People could readily envisage a time when the catalogues of great libraries would be freely available for online consultation. But access to the actual contents of all those books - well, it was too preposterous to even think about it. Just for starters, who would bear the unconscionable costs of scanning millions and millions of texts?

Who indeed? Enter Google. Last week, it announced that it had embarked on what we might call 'Howard's Quest' - to make digital copies of some of the world's largest university library collections and incorporate the texts into its vast web index. The goal is to enable anyone, anywhere instantly to tap into enormous academic libraries - some with texts dating back centuries. Google has signed up four major universities - Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan - plus the New York Public Library, as partners in the programme, which will take six years to scan and index more than 10 million books and periodicals. At Stanford, Harvard and Oxford, Google will scan only samples - albeit large ones - of the universities' holdings. But at Michigan they will do every book and periodical on campus - partly because Google co-founder Larry Page graduated from there, and partly because Michigan has one of the best university collections in the US.

Where the scanned volumes are out of copyright the entire text will be available online; if they are still in copyright, then searchers will get only sections of text relevant to their inquiry - plus links to booksellers and libraries where the full text can be purchased or consulted.

It's a staggering project that will cost about $10 per volume scanned. And until last week, it was thought to be impractical. 'Going as fast as we can with the traditional means of doing this,' said John Wilkin, associate librarian at the University of Michigan, 'it would take us about 1,600 years to do all seven million volumes. Google will do it in six years. If we were to do this job ourselves, it would probably cost $600m. That's just the human cost of preparing the material for scanning, packing it up and sending it out to vendors and then quality-control checking of the results. I can't imagine there's anything out there on this scale. Nothing has been conceived on this scale. It's access to a research collection that we never would have dared imagine possible. Anyone with an internet connection now has access to a vast research library.'

Which brings us back to Rheingold's question. We have not begun to comprehend the implications of what's going on. Google has become a vast, global memory prosthesis. It's no longer as important to remember details as it used to be. If I can't remember who wrote a particular song, or the name of the Sherpa who first climbed Everest, or what Mandy Rice-Davies said at the trial of Stephen Ward - well, I can Google it. Once upon a time, being learned involved holding a lot of knowledge and information in one's head. Are we moving towards a world where the important thing is not what you know, but how to find it?

And what happens when a major chunk of the world's serious literature is available to anyone with an internet connection, rather than being the exclusive preserve of western elites? Will the Google project reinforce the stranglehold of English as the global language? If I were Jacques Chirac, I'd already be negotiating with the company to scan the contents of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Joyeux Noel to you.