Worrying About Books, Worrying About Libraries

Following along from last month’s exchanges at the Writers’ Union, a couple of interesting speculative pieces on what technology will do to book publishing and to libraries.

The Economist has a piece this week from Book Expo America on Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry
. I liked the last line, which echoes what I said to the Writers’ Union:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

But the more valuable piece is by Robert Darnton in the New York Review, entitled The Library in the New Age. It’s to be savoured in its entirety, but here are some extracts from the argument:

1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line. That claim is misleading, and it raises the danger of creating false consciousness, because it may lull us into neglecting our libraries.

2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States. Contrary to what one might expect, there is little redundancy in the holdings of the five libraries: 60 percent of the books being digitized by Google exist in only one of them.

3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.

4. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology. Google may disappear or be eclipsed by an even greater technology, which could make its database as outdated and inaccessible as many of our old floppy disks and CD-ROMs. Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete, because obsolescence is built into the electronic media.

5. Google will make mistakes.

6. There is no guarantee that Google’s copies will last.

7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available? If so, which one will it put at the top of its search list?

8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book. For example, size. … It is important to get the feel of a book—the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding.

It ends with a call to arms:

The research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.