Kevin Kelly had a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the ongoing scanning and digitization of books and what it might mean for the future of publishing, scholarship, and reading.
Scanning is a great idea, both for preservation and for creating a hypertext database for scholarship. The publishing types who are erecting obstacles to scanning and the preservation of orphaned titles are clueless twits as far as I’m concerned.
Will book publishing change in the same way that music, film and now television are changing? Definitely, despite or maybe because of the clueless twits. Will books go away? Probably not. Will hyper-text databases of books that allow annotation, cross-referencing, and other ongoing dialogs with readers detract from scholarship? I can’t imagine how.
Would such a database trample on intellectual property rights? No — any rights-owner who demonstrates ownership of anything in the data base could have it removed if they so desired.
If an author fears piracy, I would urge him to fear obscurity or invisibility instead.
I’m more concerned about who will control the hypertext database, how it will be indexed, and how it will be monetized. If Google wants to scan everything in five major libraries, I say go for it. And if they want to create a search technology on top of the data that generates revenue via advertising, that’s OK too. We all know now that a Google search is in part prioritized based on payments made by advertisers. We’d also be aware of this dynamic if we used a Google book-search product.
However, the raw data needs to be a public resource and available for others to use and access outside of Google products and services so academic, non-profit, and open-source groups could construct alternate search technologies without commercial bias, or perhaps with specialized biases designed for special applications. And it goes without saying that multiple copies — perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of independant copies — would have to exist.
Kelly estimated that all of music, all of film, and every book that now exists could be digitized into about 50 petabytes of space. Right now I have 60 gigabytes of storage right here in my pocket on an iPod. Twenty years ago I couldn’t imagine enough disk storage to hold a movie. Maybe twenty years from now, we’ll be walking around with devices that can hold an entire multimedia library.
I don’t know who originally coined the phrase ‘obsolete technology becomes art’ — Brian Eno, maybe. I don’t remember. But this idea is at the center of why books won’t go away. Older technologies shrink and (maybe) decrease in importance, but they don’t go away. For the foreseeable future there will be people who want, and are willing to pay for the tactile experience of books. And the advantages of traditional linear scholarship in some contexts will persist, despite hypertext.
So it’s really too bad that luddite publishing companies and clueless authors effectively killed the scanning project. Google has the money, and was willing to do it. It’s everyone’s loss. But sooner or later, it will happen anyway. So I’m going to join Kevin Kelly and urge everyone to Scan That Book!
On vinyl recently: Promotional EP, ‘Hold On To 18′, Black And Blue; ‘Loose Nut’, Black Flag; ‘Paranoid’, Black Sabbath; ‘Autoamerican’, Blondie.
Playing on the iPod right now: ‘Jack The Ripper’, from Heresie by Univers Zero.
Robert Switzer :: A World Without Movie Theatres | 17-Aug-06 at 9:09 am | Permalink
[...] I don’t think movie theaters are going to go away. In a post I wrote a while back, I reiterated an observation someone made about how obsolete technologies become art. Examples would include black and white photography and motion pictures, the use of antiquated analog sound recording technology for it’s ‘warmth’ and ‘character’, and in the near-future, a preference for books and newspapers over their electronic equivalent. [...]