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Digital books are flying off the proverbial shelves. So it might be hard to believe that someone wants to create a new library with at least 10 million books—the kind made from trees. Even stranger, the person creating the library is Internet entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, best known for founding the Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance.
The Internet Archive is a digital library Kahle started in 1996 to store a copy of every Web page ever created. The Archive lets the public upload or download digital material for free. Open Content Alliance, created in 2005, is a group of organizations that works to get permission from copyright holders to digitize their written material. Which then gets added to the Internet Archive. (Google Book Search does something similar, but without asking for permission.)
Kahle has done a lot to reduce our dependence on paper. So it may seem ironic that's he's also investing so much time and money to save books. But Kahle, who ultimately wants a copy of every book ever published, sees them as an endangered species that needs to be protected. He's not ready to write off the written page.
—Larry Greenemeier
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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7 Comments
Add CommentWhy does he want to do this when a printed copy could be produced from the digital version, esp. if the digital copy is in PDF, or some other format that preserves the page layout. What's the point of trying to preserve a paper copy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrinted books can last a long time if printed on acid-free paper and not handled much, but they won't last forever and by the time they need replacing the technologies to reproduce them in exactly the same form will probably be extinct.
Digital versions can be much more easily reproduced and preserved.
The reason to do this seems obvious: digital information is very easy to modify or destroy, in seconds. Remember when Amazon goofed off by selling certains books they did not have the right to? It took the company a few minutes to eliminate all those books from the purchaser's databases. Open the computer, log on, and "poof" all your books are gone. Or changed. Imagine this in the hand of the wrong person (a new Hitler, a religious fanatic or some freakish Chinese-like government). They could destroy every book they dislike in minutes, from everywhere! You can keep a hidden copy somewhere, you say? Not for long, all computers need some access to the internet nowadays and that is all that's needed. Digitalizing all books and digitalizing votes are humanities greatest scares at this point in my opinion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore, it's rather doubtful, there will be general access to the internet in, say, 30 to 50 years, or maybe even earlier. Computers are an oil product, and at some point in this very century the oil point will rise to astronomical heights.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'oil point' should read 'oil price'...
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisduanewilliams asked a good question-- "why preserve books". In founding this project (I run the Archive which is the subject of this piece), this is what I came up with:
http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/ -brewster
We humans are obsessed with our centrality in the universe and that everything about us is special or sacred.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, 'stuff' becomes clutter. If you want to find two socks that match in your drawer, it's easier if the 100 socks without a matching mate are tossed out.
Paper is a proven long term media for information storage, e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not so much how it is stored but how it is recovered. Want to watch your old ED Beta tapes? Do you still have a player that works?
Storage of data is a real concern for archivists who are looking beyond the next 50 years.How long will CDs and DVDs hold information before the polymers break down. video and audio tapes "print through" from one layer to the next so you get gibberish if the tapes aren't "re-stacked" periodically to combat the electronic signatures on the tapes from interfering with one another. Thumb drives and hard drives. Museums will likely e the only places who will know what a USB port is in 100 years much less make use of it. Written or printed text requires only the page and working eyeballs to retrieve information. Eyeballs are hopefully going to be around for the next 100,000 years.
We tend to put too much trust in our electronic technology. Cosmic rays and Solar storms can wipe out information but the printed page remains.
And ten million copies is not enough. That would hardly cover the United Kingdom's literary output over the years let alone the US, Canada and the rest of the world. And 10 million copies is nothing anyway. J.K. Rollings has more than a half-billion copies of Harry Potter in print.
Archivists are well aware of the problem with storage of data but have yet to come up with anything as good as paper and print.