The Alexandria Quartet: Books, Google, Microsoft & Amazon
In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Grafton had a long article entitled “Future Reading.” Subtitled, “Digitization and its discontents,” Grafton looked at how “the computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press,” with huge companies like Google and Microsoft embarking on massive efforts to digitize the world’s knowledge by breaking down the contents of books and pouring them into easily accessible databases which anyone can tap into. Grafton compares all of this, as most people tend to do, with the huge Library of Alexandria, which was founded in Egypt in 300BC. Back in the day, the Library of Alexandria housed the largest repository of human knowledge on earth, with more than 500,000 works. And now, or so it’s being said, major Internet companies like Google and Microsoft are looking to create Alexandria 2.0, digitizing every scrap of print and storing it in a database.
Grafton, however, is skeptical. While he admits that “we have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production,” he thinks that all of these efforts “will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.”
And while Grafton’s correct in stating that the argument is hardly as simple as saying Google Book Search=the Library of Alexandria, what Grafton fails to grasp is that an awful lot of knowledge these days is already digital. After all, to “digitize” something means that you turn it from being non-digital to digital, and yet — for the most part — knowledge now begins as a digital form. So while Grafton can talk all he wants about microfilm, or musty books being scanned, he makes no allowances (or concession) to the fact that a great deal of present and future knowledge will be digital from its conception. But, of course, since this is the New Yorker, Grafton’s really just slouching towards digitization, and not really embracing it. He finishes his article with the usual Animal Farm-esque bleating of “Digital good, print better,” implying that, while students with computers will get most of the picture online, for the real thing they’re going to have to go to a library: “The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.”
Grafton’s fetishism here for the trappings and mise-en-scène of an overly romantic literary life is embarrassing. And the idea that true knowledge is contained only in “dusty, crumbling, smelly irreplaceable documents” is anachronistic to the point of devolution. I mean, I read his piece online; would it have been better for me to have read a dusty, crumbling, smelly version in print? What would I have gained from paper that eluded me on the screen? The answer, of course, is nothing.
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I don’t get it. Why do we have to go read smelly books? Is there information encoded in the smell?
Anyway, I think that how much information you’re capable of storing is one thing, but how accessible your information is is what’s really important. And I’m pretty sure that Google’s search engines beat out the Dewey Decimal system more often than not.
I completely agree with your reading of the Grafton piece, but I think one small concession must be made to the man’s particular debility/strength: he’s a historian–and a historian of the book, no less. This means he’s oriented to think about books/print today as resources tomorrow. Will the digital be preserved? What will it preserve? Print fixed and finalized something in a way digital might but who really knows at this point. Among print’s primary strengths or virtues is its preservabiity. The digital has many strengths and virtues but preservability and the long view aren’t foremost among them.
You make some good points. On the one hand, print is extremely durable. However, witness what happened to the Library at Alexandria. The same thing could happen today if the main branch of the New York Public Library was burned to the ground. However, if all of that material had been digitized, and was living on servers all around the world, then we would still have that knowledge. This being said, as anyone who has had a computer die on them knows, digitized knowledge can also be agonizingly ephemeral. But I think, in the long run, more data can be stored and accessed digitally than could ever be made available physically. And maybe I knocked Grafton for being too romantic, but what he doesn’t realize is people are just as adamant (and amorous) about their iPods and laptops.
Alexandria wasn’t exactly a print library (as print hadn’t been invented), but my point really is that digitized knowledge is material, in the end, and it can be burned, too. The Internet Archive is distributing its archive throughout the world–materially, in Pedaboxes (I believe), because any kind of library can be destroyed. Are server farms less vulnerable than the Library of Alexandria? When print is distributed, it stays distributed. The digital all comes back to some hardware somewhere, doesn’t it?
i think you read the piece all wrong…
but maybe i give the guy too much credit.
still, hear me out…
although, based on some luddite statements,
i wanted to dismiss what he was saying,
as i got to the core, i heard sensible stuff,
like “there’s so much more _out_there_ than
what google will be scanning that if you
_really_ want to get _all_ of it, you will
_still_ have to trudge off to your library,
because cyberspace won’t have all of it…”
and — as far as i can see — he’s right…
i see no a big push to digitize everything.
no one (but google) seems to have _any_ money
to support such a thing, or so it appears…
even if we restrict ourselves to “the books”,
it’s difficult to expect to have them all.
indeed, i see the major publishing companies
– um, like _penguin_, form whom you work –
putting major stumbling blocks on all that,
insisting that their “copyright” means that
we cannot make their books available online,
for easy accessibility by anyone at all,
even though those books _are_ available at
(wait for it…) their neighborhood library
– fully, at absolutely no cost to readers…
and if the book isn’t there, chances are that
they will be happy to order it up for you…
so maybe you should get your own employer
moving in the right direction before you
challenge people who call it like i see it.
-bowerbird
Joseph
I suspect the smell thing is Pavolovian conditioning. If every time someone read something they liked they smelled a book, they would come to associate the pleasure of reading with the smell of books.
The smell itself would then trigger the feeling of reading pleasure in a conditioned person.