"We could be sure to specify that our palace will have the best and most well-stocked library in the world," she suggests.

She considers this. 

"Maybe...I guess that would work...but...I think I'm still going to build some book-related stuff into what's available from the beginning, just to be safe." 

"That seems sensible. What sort of book-related things would you like? Perhaps we can ask Tabitha which of them are likely to change society in ways we'd find hard to predict."

"I want..." she mulls this over. "I want...for nobody to be able to take a book away from me."

"...hmm," she says. "Is it books that you don't want to lose, or the knowledge they give you? Would your purpose be well served by magic for reading a book carefully and then never forgetting what was in it? Or would you rather have magic for carrying around a little library all your own, in a pocket that only you can see? Or, on a grander scale, magic for ensuring that any books taken from a library will return to it within a few weeks?"

"Well, it's the information in the books, but even I can't just read all the books, and I don't know in advance which ones I'm going to need, so...I like the pocket thing, honestly...ooooh, you know what would be good? A magic book that copies any book you touch it to, and then it can turn into any book it's copied."

Tabitha clears her throat. "That's starting to approach a society-transforming level of information technology," she warns, a little apologetically.

"Not if we ensure that only the royal family has it to begin with," Raivethrani suggests.

"What exactly are the implications of it being a society-transforming amount of information technology? If we accidentally qualify for a higher tech level, does that mean that even more tech has to happen?"

"I'm trying to respect Raivethrani's preferences about not getting too far from the sort of technological landscape that you understand well enough to predict what it'll be like," she explains, "and if people can very casually copy each other's books at a touch, I think that's likely to lead to effects outside that scope."

"Oh. Like what? Not that I think you can explain everything, just, I feel like I'll understand better what that means, if you can tell me a thing I really wouldn't expect."

"Well, I haven't seen a world with exactly that technology and nothing else before, so I can't be very specific, but—when knowledge is easier to spread, the speed of innovation gets faster. People invent more things, and other people learn about those things and improve on them, and some of those things are themselves forms of information or communication technology, which makes everything faster again, and so on. The Contemporary tech level tends to lead to a more egalitarian society partly because of secondary effects from information-age technology. Language also starts changing faster, but formal written language changes slower—I'm not sure if that specifically would happen with your book-copying magic, I'd sort of expect you to get one or the other effect but not both, but I can't be sure. Is any of that the sort of answer you were looking for?"

"No...I mean, that all makes sense? I lived in a democracy. Mama and Grandda could vote. We have, like, the printing press, and telegraphs. None of that stuff is stuff I would have trouble thinking of." 

"I'm bewildered by most of it," Raivethrani puts in. "Language changes faster? Language changes?"

She considers this. “Maybe not so much when everyone is immortal. But, like, information transmission is lossy, so if you learn to talk from your parents and they learned to talk from their parents and they learned to talk from their parents, and your great-grandparents’ generation isn’t around anymore to learn from…”

"...oh, I see. Because you're mortal. I suppose I can see that... but then why would having more books make it faster? Surely, if you can still read the books your ancestors wrote, you'd have a better idea of what words they used to use?"

"Hmm. What's your writing system like?"

"...in what sense, and why do you ask?"

"Well, there's two basic kinds of writing system I'm aware of, and one's phonetic, and the other's ideographic--in other words, in the first case characters correspond to sounds, and in the other one they correspond to whole words. And in either case how you say a character can shift over time! Like, there's this one character," she scratches out a V on the paper she was given for drawing Wilbur's dinosaur feet, "and in my language you say it 'vuh,' and in some other language I think you say it 'fuh.'"

"...hmm. I don't think we have any letters that are spoken differently in different places, but I suppose I don't know what the Elves have got up to since the last time we were on speaking terms with them. It might be different in societies where people die less often, though."

"It might! --Is it?" she asks Tabitha. 

"Yes, longevity does overall tend to slow linguistic drift," she confirms. "Though it's not a guarantee."

"Does her language have linguistic drift she doesn't know about?"

"Let me see if I can look that up..."

She gazes into the distance for a moment, then shakes her head. "It's not in the notes I have access to, sorry."

"My people only live in one place and we all know each other," she says. "If the language has changed since I was born, it's not in ways I noticed or remember. But I'm hardly the eldest of my kind, so maybe it happened before my time."