Readings for Week 4, Part 1

Kevin Kelly, Scan this book!

Very engaging. I could write a paper on this article, so forgive the long, scattered entry.

I think Kelly is right that leaving books out of the scanning and digitization craze is detrimental to their value as a medium. With no books in the body of information that people go to first (or will go to first) to search, they will likely seem increasingly unimportant. I do wonder, though, if digitizing books wouldn't also promote their decline. I'm wondering how useful a book online is as a unit, in its entirety. It can be searched, yes, and linked to and linked from and all sorts of interesting connections can be made, and it can be discovered where it otherwise wouldn't have been. But none of that involves reading the book as a whole... it merely becomes part of, as Kelly says, "the world's only book." If one did want to read the whole book, I imagine it would still be nicer to find it in paper form. Even if you liked staring at a computer screen, I think the prevalence of hyperlinks (while useful at other times) would be very distracting. It seems to me that electronic text is inherently better for smaller chunks of text-- and what will that mean for the book?

I was struck by how expensive it is to scan a book. An average of $30 here in the U.S.? That's more than many books retail for, and multiply that by the 8 million books at Stanford alone.... I'm assuming the price will come down, but what sort of societal debt do we owe Google (and others) for footing the bill? What are the implications of having this work done privately?

Kelly claims that the "underbooked" will be the ones best served by digital libraries, but I think he unintentially pokes a hole in his own argument by naming "elderly people in Peru" as one of the groups who will be helped. The "underbooked" are sadly also those with less access to electronic resources. The elderly, those lower on the economic ladder, and those in developing countries are all likely to be left out of at least the initial glories of digital libraries.

I also have some quibbles about what all we're including in our universal library. Kelly suggests it should include "a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists." Note the "artists" part. I agree it's probably a necessary restriction. Why, then, are we including (in his words) a copy of all Web pages (including dead ones) and the "tens of millions of blog posts now gone"? Just curious.

Another thought that staggers me is the degree of inaccuracy possible when all of the hyperlinking and weaving is done by laypeople. The Internet is full of mis-linked information, or links to dead pages, or broken links. It's surprising (and heartening) to me what degree of accuracy things like Wikipedia manage to achieve, but it still concerns me that our global library could potentially be very untrustworthy. Imagining a reliable monitoring system, though, is more than a bit overwhelming.

People enter a search term into Google instead of a more powerful, specific database because it's fast and it's easy and the results are generally good enough (if not the best). In the same way, if and when the "universal library" is up and running, even if it's only as reliable as Wikipedia or a Google search, I think it'll be the research tool of choice for most (including myself). It seems to me that we might want to put more conscious thought into how we proceed, but that's a huge information ecology to try to have a say in.