I remember reading an article about 20 years ago about the paperless office.
Then it was the cashless society. Now it's the bookless library bookshelf.
As long as we have printers and people want to curl up in bed with a good
book or want to run their finger across a page of Braille, there will be
paper, therefore books also.
Let's leave the computers for want they do best, fast searches for
information
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Poehlman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 2:44 PM
Subject: Re: [VICUG-L] Could this be the final chapter in the life of the
book?
I doubt we'll see much change in how people do things for quite some
time. First, the number of ways has to grow and at least two of them
have to become as easy as reading a book.
On Jan 23, 2007, at 12:40 PM, Peter Altschul wrote:
Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book?
Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times January 21, 2007 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
article/0,,2092-2557653,00.html
The world's libraries are heading for the internet, says Bryan
Appleyard. If this means we lose touch with real books and treat
their content as "information', civilisation is the loser
"The majority of information," said Jens Redmer, director of Google
Book Search in Europe, "lies outside the internet."
Redmer was speaking last week at Unbound, an invitation-only
conference at the New York Public Library (NYPL). It was a groovy,
bleeding-edge-of-the- internet kind of affair. There was Chris
Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a
book about the new business economics of the net. There was Arianna
Huffington, grand panjandrum of both the blogosphere and smart East
Coast society.
But this wasn't just another jolly. There were also publishers and
Google execs, two groups of people who might one day soon be fighting
for their professional lives before the Supreme Court.
For Unbound was another move in a strange, complex and frequently
obscure war that is being fought over the digitisation of the great
libraries of the world. The details of this war may seem baffling,
but there is nothing baffling about what is at stake. Intellectual
property -- intangibles like ideas, knowledge and information -- is,
in the globalised world, the most valuable of all assets. China may
be booming on the basis of manufacturing, but, overwhelmingly, it
makes things invented and designed in the West or Japan. Intellectual
property is the big difference between the developing and developed
worlds.
But intellectual property rights and the internet are uneasy
bedfellows. Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful". The words
"universally accessible" carry the implicit threat that nobody can
actually own or earn revenue from any information since it will all
be just out there.
Furthermore, Redmer's point indicates that, for Google, the mission
has barely left base camp. Himalayas of information are still waiting
to be conquered. And the highest peaks of all are the great libraries
of the world, the repositories of the 100m or more books that have
been produced since Johann Gutenberg invented movable type in the
15th century.
In December 2004, Google announced its assault on these peaks. It had
made a deal with five libraries -- with the NYPL and at the
universities of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford -- to scan
their stocks, making their contents available online via Google Book
Search (books.google.com). Ultimately, it is thought, some 30m
volumes will be involved. Microsoft, meanwhile, has made a deal with
the British Library to scan 100,000 books -- 25m pages -- this year
alone. Google has now scanned 1m books.
The first thing to be said is that Google Book Search, though still
in its "beta" or unfinalised form, is an astonishing mechanism.
Putting my own name in came up with 626 references and gave me
immediate access to passages containing my name in books, most of
which were quite unknown to me. Moreover, clicking on one of these
references brings up an image of the actual page in question.
But the second thing to be said is that I could read whole passages
of my books of which I own the copyright. At once a huge intellectual
property issue looms. The Americans are ploughing ahead with this,
scanning in material both in and out of copyright. The British -- at
Oxford's Bodleian Library and the British Library -- are being more
cautious, allowing only the scanning of out-of-copyright books. This
may, of course, mean nothing, since the big American libraries will,
like the Bodleian and the British Library, contain every book
published in English, so they will all ultimately be out there on the
net.
American publishers are not happy. Before its 2004 announcement,
Google had been doing deals with individual publishers to scan their
books. But digitising the libraries would seem to render these deals
defunct. Furthermore, since Google is acquiring copyright material at
no cost, it seems to be treating books quite differently from all
other media. It is prepared to pay for video and music, but not,
apparently, for books. The Google defence is that their Book Search
system is covered by the legal concept of "fair dealing". No more
than 20% of a copyright book will be available, the search is
designed to show just relevant passages, and it will provide links to
sites where the book can be bought.
Unimpressed, the Authors Guild, supported by the Association of
American Publishers, has started a class action suit against Google.
A deal may yet be done, but neither side sounds in a compromising
mood, and it looks likely that this will go all the way to the
Supreme Court, whose ruling on this case may prove momentous.
But still, we are only in the foothills of the library digitisation
issue. When Google made its 2004 announcement, Jean-Noël Jeanneney,
president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, experienced
"neither distress nor irritation at the project. Just a healthy
jolt". He welcomed the idea that "a treasure trove of knowledge,
accumulated for centuries, would be opened up to the benefit of all,"
but he was also "seized by anxiety". Driven by this anxiety, he wrote
a short book, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge.
Though he declines to talk of "a crusade or a cultural war", the book
is a clear case of "aux armes, citoyens!" The citizens in question
are, in this case, European rather than just French, for Jeanneney
sees the Google project as an act of American cultural hegemony. He
has won the backing of Chirac for a project to develop a European
search engine to rival Google, the so-called "Airbus solution" -- the
creation of Airbus was a deliberate attempt to combat the ascendancy
of Boeing in aircraft manufacture.
Jeanneney says that Google is not what it seems. Its search results
are biased by commercial and cultural pressures. He has a point. Try
this: go to Google Book Search and enter Gustave Flaubert. The first
results are full of English translations of Madame Bovary.
The books of the English-speaking world are given overwhelming
priority. Equally, Google's main search engine produces paid-for
sites. Google is a profit machine. Nothing wrong with that, as long
as we don't delude ourselves into thinking it is an entirely neutral
source of information.
But there are even deeper issues revolving around the distinction
between information and knowledge. "A search engine," says John
Sutherland, professor of English at UCL, "is not an index."
An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results
are the product of an algorithm with information. Parents will
already have seen the power of the algorithm. Google has supplanted
the textbook as the source of homework research.
Furthermore, with the advance of library digitisation, students will
increasingly get through their degrees on screen rather than in
libraries. Indeed, Bill Gates expects in the very near future that
Microsoft will be able to give all undergraduates a $400 hand-held
device that will contain all the text books they need for their
course. We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books,
the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last
500 years.
Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, refuses to
see this in apocalyptic terms. With 100,000 of her books being
scanned by Microsoft this year, she regards the ultimate digitisation
of the library's entire 150m-item collection (journals included) as
"a wonderful outcome, though I suspect I'll be long dead by then".
Brindley disagrees with Jeanneney about having to fight off American
hegemony. She points out that search engines are still in their
infancy. Google has competitors that are bound to eat into its
monopoly. Furthermore, improved technologies will make search results
more like indexes, working more precisely as knowledge providers than
simple information dispensers. The British Library has no choice, she
believes, but to go with this technological flow. The alternative is
to become little more than "a book museum".
Back at the NYPL, David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services
said, "Ultimately it's not up to Google or the publishers to decide
how books will be read. It's the readers who will have the final say."
No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will
determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or,
ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for
information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn't educate
and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On
that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the
digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.
Additional reporting: Dominic Rushe
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