by Pius Charles Murray | Jan-12-2010
As we wind down the "aughts" decade, with digital books galore on the horizon (and the $195 Norton facsimile edition of C.J. Jung'sobjet d'art/culture The Red Book selling out around the country), the NBCC seeks the best guest posts about the future of book culture, including essays,interviews and free-range opining. The topic: How do you see book culture evolving over the next decade? Pius Charles Murray offers these thoughts.
“A legend clings to every stone.” So Lucan explains Julius Caesar’s wonder at seeing the ruins of Troy in Lucan’s First Century A.D. book describing the Roman Civil War, which description may aptly be applied to every book published and every library constructed (Lucan, cited in Manguel, 2006, p. 14). According to Alberto Manguel’s magisterial mediation on the importance of libraries (and, by extension, to the information collected therein in every conceivable format) to human civilization, titled The Library at Night, there are in Western Civilization at least two possible human endeavors in accumulating knowledge. On the one hand, the Tower of Babel (cf. Gen 11:1-9) serves as a cautionary metaphor of exclusionary tendencies; the moral of the biblical narrative is that God oversaw the introduction of many different languages so that human beings would not overstep their power or authority in cosmic affairs due to their hubris. On the other hand, the ancient world’s most famous library, the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, constituted an inclusionary approach. Founded by the Ptolemaic successors of Alexander the Great near the end of the Third Century, BC, its purpose was to collect for safekeeping for posterity all then known human knowledge. In the so-called Letter of Aristeas (which may have been apocryphal), King Ptolemy I requests from every government on earth books of every kind by “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too” (cited in Manguel, 2006, p. 22). It was a tribute to the intellectual curiosity of humanity as it collected, organized, kept in memory the contributions of the past, and, by its existence, provided for future learning.
There are several would-be successors to the original Library at Alexandria which burnt down around 47, BC for unknown reasons. In 1988, the Egyptian government constructed a new library at Alexandria which cost approximately $220 million USD and is large enough to house 8 million volumes: print as well as audio-visual materials. Its raison d’être, however, does not attempt to reduplicate the all-encompassing mission of the original Library. The World Wide Web has also spawned some attempts at collecting and organization information. One of the weaknesses of the WWW on the whole is its ephemerality; fully 70 percent of the various types of communications found on the WWW last no longer than four months (Manguel, 2006, p. 28). Philosophically, then, the WWW offers a continuous present. By way of contrast, for its patrons, the Library at Alexandria provided (as do libraries and books today) a present window to the past that through the act of reading and synthesis opened up new vistas, new knowledge for the future.
Currently, Google is most active in digitizing items for World Wide Web access. The company does not publicly release the number of items being digitized. However, The Economist (2007) guesstimates based on information provided by Google’s Daniel Clancey who heads the book digitization project that the company may be able to digitize approximately ten million books per year out of an approximate number of sixty-five million total in existence. Google’s digitization project has partnered with the libraries of a baker’s dozen academic institutions as well as a number of publishers (The Economist, 2007). The goal of the project is to provide an enhanced library catalog-type record on the World Wide Web (cf. http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html). The basic entry for all items will include bibliographic information just as a library catalog would. For items that are out of print and in the public domain, a customer will be able to download the entire book. For those items still under copyright, links to various bookstores from where it may be purchased are included (cf. http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html). According to the Google Books Library project webpage (cf. http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html), the purpose of the project is to make accessible otherwise hard-to-find books; matching the right book to the right person at the right time is intended to help create a new generation of readers.