Back in the days when the only people who knew the Internet were people who had read Ed Krol's book we all understood something to be true: All information could be digitized and searchable. Back in the glory days of Panix.com, the first ISP, we would WAIS and Gopher and Archie ourselves into a pleasant oblvion of treasure hunts through the then sparsely populated and scantily indexed 'net. It wasn't even the world wide web (that's what 'www' means, by the way) because it didn't even span the globe. So when Project Gutenberg came along, we knew we were on the edge of a new world.
Of course, nobody took us seriously. Nobody believed that money could be made or attention could be maintained. It has taken roughly a dozen years, and now the implications of the thing we all knew, Moore's Law, has made the improbable, reality. And so today Google blows people's minds. It shouldn't. We've wanted this all along.
So their spat with publishers was entirely predictable, but here's the thing. Books don't move. Books are for sitting still, taking your time, working alone in relative quiet. Knowledge and information are useful all of the time, and those restrictions limit the usability of books. There was a time when it didn't matter that books didn't move, because nobody did business any other way. But now we in the IT /Software/Telecom industries require that information previously jailed in books move. The information outside of books now dwarfs that inside.
What I am doing with music, I expect soon to do with books. What am I doing with music? I am buying it piece by piece and recalling it at will. Today I can listen to The Family, George Duke, and St. Etienne on the same CD, in my car, from my laptop, from my phone or over my home theatre. When I want, how I want. I manage a huge library. I'll do the same with written material in the future. When I want to recall that passage from 'Dry September' or from 'Battle Royale' that intrigued me in highschool, I can bring it up. Maybe it costs me a nickel. Maybe it costs me a dollar.
Remember. There was a time, just 10 years ago, when eBay didn't exist. The very idea seemed impossible. People scoffed at Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com. Right now, people doubt the poltical influence of the blogosphere. There are certain fights not worth fighting. It doesn't make sense to fight the digitization of the information in books.The very crux of this matter is this - did Shakespeare write, "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well"?. No, but that is the most popular adaptation into television. Chances are more people have learned it the wrong way. Some may not even know it to be Shakespeare. One of these days, coming soon, we will consume cultural knowledge from around the globe the same way we sample food and music. If the authentic producers don't get with the digital program we will live in a world of Chef Boyardee info.
The obvious lack of mobility for non-digitized documents can be an asset or a liability, as folks on the Google Blog note:
"Nature, politics and war have always been the mortal enemies of written works," she said. "Most recently, Hurricane Katrina dealt a blow to the libraries of the Gulf Coast. At Tulane University, the main library sat in nine feet of water -- water that soaked the valuable Government Documents collection: more than 750,000 items -- one of the largest collections of government materials in Louisiana -- 90 percent of it now lost."
A book is a form of a document, and document is a loaded word, coming as I do from Xerox. Don't fence it in.
I enjoy the vanity of the physically printed word. I would love to be able to order books printed to spec, just like those custom collections they used to sell on TV like so many KTel album collections. Dear Barnes & Noble, I would like to order a fresh printing of a leather bound 'Gullivers Travels' and a new paperback copy of 'Oliver Twist'. James Frey's book, I'll take as a PDF.
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