David Weinberger writes:
Will we really give up on books so easily? We have so much invested in them. They shape knowledge. They prove expertise. They feel good. They smell like they’re grown outdoors. Their heft impresses us with our wisdom. Yet, we’ll get over them. It might take a couple of weeks, but it’ll happen. The day we have a portable, networked, interactive e-book that actually works, we’ll start to give up on the old mite-infested beasts.
Today I attended “Future of the Book: A Conversation with Newsweek’s Steven Levy.” Steven was joined by Paul Courant, University Librarian at the University of Michigan. The discussion was fairly interesting, but came off a bit like an advertisement for the Kindle. Courant suggested that digital reading technologies are an apparent inevitability, but he seemed a little too eager to jump on the Kindle bandwagon. We all agree that the Kindle has some problems (some of us more than others). But we also agree that the Kindle could become a revolutionary digital reading device, with some tweaks, both in the UI and in terms of licensing and DRM. Levy writes that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos understands that the “surge of technology will engulf all media.” But even if the Kindle gets its act together, the “future of the book” doesn’t necessarily lie in these technologies. Yes, a mobile, wirelessly downloaded, transferable, hyperlinked digital text would be rad.
But we need to also consider some tasks at hand. One area we need to address is the digitization of texts, or all this Kindle-worship will be for naught. We clearly don’t have this figured out yet, and as we speak, organizations are choosing sides, choosing digitization partners. The big players are Google and the Open Content Alliance (OCA); Michigan’s gone the Google route. I won’t argue against the utility of Google Book at Michigan–it’s definitely a worthwhile endeavor that never would have taken place outside investment by private industry. Individual text digitization projects might be useful and generally accessible, but they’re not interoperable. Google’s not sharing its metadata with OCA. It’s not easy to search across projects–Google does not index the Open Content Alliance content in its search engine. Michigan has just passed the 1 million book mark. How many of these works have already been scanned by OCA, or vice versa? Seems like a lot more information sharing could be taking place. For sharing to be useful, it’d be nice to agree on some standards beforehand. But the whole point may be moot–while Google may be doing their thing and the Open Content Alliance doing theirs, it seems we’re now traveling down paths that might never again meet.
Oh yeah…there’s that whole copyright (and orphan works) thing too…hmmm…
