"Scan This Book!"
- From: Al Magary <al@[redacted]>
- Subject: "Scan This Book!"
- Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 23:22:32 PDT
The NYTimes Magazine this Sunday has a long article
"Scan This Book!" by Kevin Kelly ("senior maverick" at Wired magazine):
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewanted=all
"In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the
world," he begins, "thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top
scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are
assembling the universal library page by page..."
A good summary, some acute observations, some nice pictures: "...once
digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced
further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into
reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now
juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are
called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of
virtual 'bookshelves'...And readers are already using Google Book
Search to round up minilibraries on a certain topic all books about
Sweden, for instance, or books on clocks. Once snippets, articles and
pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users
will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent
collection."
And a concise delineation of the unequal balance between copyright and
commons: "In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright
has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works
that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left
permanently in the dark...The size of this abandoned library is
shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are
orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain.
A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our
universal library, is dark."
That leads into "the moral imperative to scan," the Google scanning
projects, and the legal complaints against Google. Instead of going
with the technology vs. content struggle, Kelly prefers to see the
situation as a conflict of business models:
"The contours of the electronic economy are still emerging, but while
they do, the wealth derived from the old business model is being spent
to try to protect that old model, through legislation and enforcement.
Laws based on the mass-produced copy artifact are being taken to the
extreme, while desperate measures to outlaw new technologies in the
marketplace 'for our protection' are introduced in misguided
righteousness. (This is to be expected. The fact is, entire industries
and the fortunes of those working in them are threatened with demise.
Newspapers and magazines, Hollywood, record labels, broadcasters and
many hard-working and wonderful creative people in those fields have to
change the model of how they earn money. Not all will make it.)"
Seems like I read obits every day.
Cheers,
Al Magary
[Moderator: Sam Vaknin also sent in a pointer to this article, which
carries the subhead "Despite the opposition of publishers and their lawyers,
the world's texts are being electronically copied, digitized,
searched and linked. - JMO]