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A Bit More from Robert Darnton on the Future of Books
December 3, 2009 17:06
UPDATE: Robert Darnton was interviewed today on Minnesota Public Radio. You can listen to it here.
Recently, we've posted numerous times with material by and about Robert Darnton. Info about his new book, audio interviews and several essays (including one from last week) about Google and digitization.
Today, in the Harvard Gazette (a paper from the Harvard Public Affairs Office), Darnton speaks a bit more about books. The brief article is titled, "In Defense of Books."
Quotes
+ “Digitization is transforming the communication systems of the modern age without replacing print,” consoles Darnton, noting that the death of the book is predicted all the time, but more books appear in print each year.
+ “Soon one million new titles will be published annually throughout the world. The codex — a book you read by turning pages as opposed to the volumen, a scroll that you unroll to read — is one of the greatest inventions of all time. Two thousand years old and still going strong, stronger than ever in print form.”
+ Darnton’s own book is part history of the form, part plan for the future. He argues that the value of the book cannot be surpassed, though digitization has its rewards.
“In an e-book, you can provide endless supplementary material in various formats — archives, photos, films, and hyperlinks to other sources.”
+ But this library leader also has concerns about the difficulties of preserving digital works: “Their hardware and software will become obsolete; they are fragile; their digits can unravel, and their metadata may not be adequate to locate them, years hence, in cyberspace.”
Darnton agrees that the physicality of books provides irreplaceable pleasure, saying, “They delight the eye, feel good to the touch, and even smell good.” He tells of a French producer of e-books who “offered its customers a sticker that they can put on their computers and scratch to produce a musty smell like that of an old volume.”
Source: Harvard Gazette
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