There was a time when the most important thing a man owned was his horse. There was a time when it was a graver offense to steal a horse than to kill a man. Then along came the automobile, belching smoke upon the world, demanding the paving of peaceful country lanes, creating endless traffic snarls and sprawling suburbs.
Have we lost this idyllic past, when men and their beasts were closer companions than brothers or best friends? Did Henry Ford consider what would happen to the horses as he built his first automobile factory? Surely there must have been those who felt the horse would never be replaced. After all, cars were unreliable, and often became stuck in the mud. How could you travel far, when the car was reliant on gasoline? A horse needed only a field of grass for fuel. Cars were much more expensive than horses, and not nearly as good company.
This is functionally the same question Ben Vershbow poses at Future of the Book.
A library encompasses architecture, other people, temptations, distractions, whispers, touch. If the Google library is nothing more than a dynamic book locator, then it will have fallen terribly short of its immense potential to bring these afore-mentioned qualities into virtual space. Inside-the-book browsing is a sad echo of actual tactile browsing in a brick-and-mortar library.
This is like saying that driving a car down a highway is a “sad echo” of riding a horse down a country lane. It might be true, but I’m not going to trade in my Ford Mustang for the four-legged variety. When I want to commune with nature, I drive my car up to the mountains and take a walk.
Horses have not disappeared from our society. There are fanatical horse breeders and riders. Children (ironically, mostly girls) still want ponies for Christmas. Horse racing, though waning in popularity, remains a fascination for many.
At some point in the future, we will be able to say the same thing about paper books. Libraries will become the stables of the future, with their familiar smells and sounds. Many people will be dedicated to the preservation of old books, and new books will continue to be made. People will spend millions, perhaps even billions of dollars on books. But compared to the role books once played in our lives, they will have only a marginal influence.
Will there be a digital version of the library, with free, open access to the information we can now glimpse only a few pages at a time in services like Google Print? The question is as absurd as asking whether a car is a mechanical version of a horse. We will use digital resources for some of the purposes we used to use libraries for, but not all of them. A computer will never be a quiet, inspiring place to study. There will be a price for the convenience of having the world’s store of knowledge at your fingertips.
Personally I believe scholars will eventually recoil from the restrictions of copyright, and most scholarly works will be published with an open-source model, like the Public Library of Science. After all, copyright doesn’t benefit scholars, who want their work distributed as widely as possible as long as their names remain attached to it.
Many others will also prefer wide distribution of their work to the long-shot of a payday from commercial publication. So some, possibly even most knowledge will be freely available to all. The rest will have some sort of price tag. The big question is, how much will we be required to pay?
I think you took my “sad echo” comment a bit out of context. I’m not nostalgic for the pre-digital days, though it’s easy to romanticize. Actually, I would hope for Google Print to offer so much more than physical libraries can. My dissatisfaction with inside-the-book searches is simply that they are limiting - like looking at a book through a mail slot. Google Print should be place where you can actually get books - electronically, printed on demand, or accreted (as in, works in progress, communal works etc.), or however else.
Oh, I think it will be. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. But it most definitely will not be free. That’s not to say everything about libraries is free either. We often pay for xeroxing, for printing microfilm, for interlibrary loan.
One thing I worry about with e-texts is the idea of an expiration date. Sure you will be able to download an e-text from Google, but maybe you can only have it for a week, and with no printing allowed.
We actually already have an example of this happening: The New York Times buries its old stories in an online archive — you want the words, you got to pay for them.
re: the “sad echo” quote. I took that and ran with it a bit, but I don’t think I took it out of context. Books do have real advantages over e-texts, just like horses and cars (ask Osama how he escaped at Tora Bora — it wasn’t in a car), but I think over time we’ll forget about them. Why should we build enormous, expensive, ornate warehouses to store data that can fit on a single $50 hard drive?
I think we’re missing one crucial part of your dream. A good way to present books in digital form. eBooks are gaining in popularity, but there are a few drawbacks. The biggst IMO is that its much more tiring to read from a computer screen than a book. Not only is it easier to hold a book than sit in front of a computer screen, it’s also easier on the eyes. I work with computers atleast 16 hours a day, and I have to take breaks or else my eyes will punish me for it. If I was reading for that same amount of time, I have to take less breaks. This might be an extreme example, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this sentiment.
You’re right: in order for digital books to be successful, we need a more comfortable way to read them. But good e-book readers are coming. I’ve written a few posts about them, for example here and here. To me the problem isn’t so much eye strain with a computer screen (though that is a significant issue) as it is ease of navigation. I like to know “where I am” in a book, and with a typical etext, there are many fewer cues. I also like to be able to flip back and forth as I read, and computers make this difficult.