Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The New York Times reported today on Google’s newspaper scanning efforts:

Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites…

Google will then serve up scans of newspapers either via Google, or on the site of the originating newspapers, which provides income for Google (in the first example) and/or traffic and visitors (and potentially income from advertising) for the original newspapers (in the second example).

And while Google got in hot water with its book-scanning program a few years ago, touching on raw nerves and igniting a debate about copyright, the newspaper initiative seems like a better idea. Because a July 21st issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 is a different kind of content from the novel The Godfather (which was published that same year). The novel is available from retailers, and is making money for its publisher and author. Whereas the newspaper is a quietly fading artifact, an orphaned antique not likely to find a foster home.  And that’s a shame since, in terms of being a sort of fossil record of our national identity, newspapers can be more valuable than books: a great novel has the ability to reflect our common hopes and dreams, but almost any old newspaper is an indispensable record of the quotidian details that make up our everyday lives.