Hugh MacLeod’s Christmas Day post on the Surface came floating through my post-cooking-and-devouring haze with a big neon sign on it screaming “Pay Attention to Me!”

But remember, Microsoft Surface is just in its infancy. Right now it’s just about $30K coffee tables. But give it ten years, it could be something much more cheaper and ubiquitous. Instead, we could be surfing the net not just on TV screens, laptops and hand-held devices, but on cocktail tables in bars. Or the mirror in our dressing room. Or bathroom tiles in the shower. On vacuum cleaners. Or even on the sides of Coke cans.

People my age, when they think of TV, they think of a nice big box in the living room. Some of us are just beginning to think of TV in terms of something we watch on our computers.

But something on the side of a Coke can?

The Surface has a televisionesque quality that appeals, but not just because it presents as a largely visual medium. Its envisioned ease of use is the most TV-like thing about it. Of course, it is Microsoft so the hard part will be compatibility- we won’t be able to just plunk any old camera down on a Surface and have it work. However, that, as MacLeod points out, is hardly the point.

Easy, visual computing built into everyday surfaces could be the intersection of digital miscellany and physical organization. Surface bookcases could offer links to subject-specific digital content and appropriately outfitted books could pull up piles of related content when brought into content with a Surface.

Yesterday, one of the recipes I was using called for a quarter cup of thyme. I realized that I had no idea if I could just chop up the thyme, stems and all or if I had to harvest a very large pile of thyme leaves from the tiny twigs I brought home from the produce section. Fortunately, I keep two cooking instruction books handy. Neither had an entry on thyme. MacLeod’s Surface on the side of Coke cans could just as easily be a Surface on the side of my thyme’s plastic house. But what about a Surface built into the kitchen that reads tags in packaging or the shape of food to give me the information I want? Or at least access to a comprehensive cooking and food database- perhaps offered by subscription in conjunction with a food website or magazine. In the end, Wikipedia and Twitter had the answer for me: either is fine and since it was all going into a paste, I used whole sprigs. It took me less than a minute to figure out, but in situ metadata would be better than having a toaster that goes online.

Format snobbery often seems to come out of fear or ignorance. Patrons looking only for books usually don’t know how to search for articles or distinguish helpful websites from rubbish. Or they just don’t realize we have articles at the book place. Our databases are scary and a book is a comforting object that says “Truth and Knowledge” to a lot of people. If an article search were as easy as setting a book onto a spot on the shelves, or seeing relevant articles listed alongside monographs, what would that do for the casual searcher who isn’t interested in hard work, but just wants some information? What if librarians could enhance the content presented on their Surfaces?

Let’s continue with cookery, since it’s a popular area in many public libraries and it’s been on my mind lately. Cookbooks and cooking websites serve similar purposes in very different ways. The best cookbooks are lovely tomes, often revolving around a theme or style of cooking. We get attached to authors, chefs or even publishers. There’s a joy to browsing a well-crafted cookbook. But we are at the mercy of the author’s organization. If we want only recipes for, say, potatoes au gratin, they could be spread throughout the book or there may only be one in the entire volume. Cooking websites are fantastically useful, but sometimes soulless (though food blogs are another story entirely). Almost every recipe has a photograph, user feedback gives an immediate sense of how well the recipe will turn out and searching gives an easy way to find hundreds of recipes for potatoes au gratin or figure out what to do with all that extra thyme. The art of the cookbook is missing, though, and sometimes the social nature of many sites means endless corporate recipes or clunkers from the differently-palated.

The Surface, as MacLeod envisions it, bridges that gap. I have a handful of thyme left, so I place the herb (or its packaging) and my favorite couple of cookbooks on my kitchen Surface (as long as I’m imagining things, I have fantastic granite surfaces in my kitchen as well) and relevant recipes from my books pop up. If those don’t suit my needs, there are digital options, shaped by the books I’ve chosen. My much-loved Moosewood volume might pull up Deborah Madison offerings but not a thyme-infused sausage suggestion.

Books acting as their own librarians, object-initiated search. Maybe it’s a bit of cheese talking to me, but I like this Christmas future.