This review was written by Dinah Birch, professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the latest edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Here are a Few Snippets:
In this motley collection of essays on the history and future of the book, Robert Darnton points out that they have many practical advantages. Portable and accessible, they require no power supply. They have proved their durbility, while today's advanced tools for storing data will be tomorrow's dinosaurs. A new technology does not always replace an older one. The internet has not yet obliterated newspapers. The printed page is not about to disappear.
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"Whatever the future may be, it will be digital" -- Robert Darnton
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He worries about Google's "monopolistic tendencies" and the risk that greed for private gain will block any aspiration to public good. How are the interests of authors and publishers to be protected? Should Google be seen as a publisher? How might research libraries fit into the operations of Google Book Search? Will we lose irreplaceable details in the rush to transform volumes into bytes?
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He identifies more questions than he is able to answer. But he is eloquent on the dangers of digitisation – for instance, that the dizzying expense of subscribing to electronic versions of leading science journals (often more than $20,000 a year) has had such an effect on accession budgets that university libraries now find it hard to buy books in other fields
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The challenges are huge and demand a coherent response. Darnton's thoughts are provocative, but his assemblage of essays, reviews and scholarly articles, many previously published in the New York Review of Books, doesn't quite measure up to the task.
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Darnton is not clear about who should read this book and why. The result is a muddle.
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