Book People Archive

New Yorker: Digitization and its discontents

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_grafton

November 5, 2007 | The New Yorker

FUTURE READING
Digitization and its discontents.

by Anthony Grafton

In 1938, Alfred Kazin began work on his first book, "On Native Grounds." 
The child of poor Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he had studied at City 
College. Somehow, with little money or backing, he managed to write an 
extraordinary book, setting the great American intellectual and literary 
movements from the late nineteenth century to his own time in a richly 
evoked historical context. One institution made his work possible: the 
New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Kazin 
later recalled, "Anything I had heard of and wanted to see, the blessed 
place owned: first editions of American novels out of those germinal 
decades after the Civil War that led to my theme of the 'modern'; old 
catalogues from long-departed Chicago publishers who had been young men 
in the eighteen-nineties trying to support a little realism." Without 
leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into "lonely small towns, prairie 
villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and 
provincial 'academies' where no one suspected that the obedient-looking 
young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be 
Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne 
Moore."

   It's an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the 
cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past 
ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but 
quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more 
dramatically than any technology since the printing press, and for the 
past five years Google has been at work on an ambitious project, Google 
Book Search. Google's self-described aim is to "build a comprehensive 
index of all the books in the world," . . .


. . . In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much 
less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now 
engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of 
the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and 
Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing.

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