Are Books a Thing of the Past?

By Eric Ivanov on 05/08/2009

Question: Will Google's effort to digitize books help us appreciate the printed word in a new form?

Note from the Editor: The printed book has long carried the connotation of comfort. Escaping into a novel on the beach, or cozying up to a fire with the latest NY Times Bestseller has long been the attraction of the physical book.

From Project Gutenberg to Google's new effort to digitize all printed books, sophomore Eric Ivanov asks if the digitization of books is changing the way we read. Are youth still comforted by physical texts, or will we all soon be cozying up to the fire with our iPods and Kindles until the batteries run out...

5 A's Framework: APPRECIATION

Libraries have long been warehouses of books, archiving printed material for a linear media world. Recently, a new movement to digitize printed materials is quickly turning the traditional library into a museum of the past, with volumes of "old media" gathering dust on shelves.

Project Gutenberg, and more recently Google, are at the forefront of the digitalizing of the printed word. Project Gutenberg began in 1971 with a mission to provide people with free access to books. It is a public domain site that accepts donations. However Project Gutenberg has now essentially become background noise. The Internet giant Google has pushed its way into public view. They have been aggressively scanning books to be part of the search engines digital library, Google Book Search, and in the process they have faced multiple lawsuits concerning copyright and fair use.

What does this all mean? Now anyone can get a book at the library, but that is beginning to change. In an era of economic uncertainty the government is beginning to cut funding for public libraries so their time might be at an end. The Internet solves the problem of access. With Google's digital library growing every day, people will begin to turn to the Internet instead of public libraries. There is also Amazon's new electronic reader, the Kindle, which allows people to store, and read multiple texts although it is only the size of a small notebook. Will Kindle replace the book in our hands? Early sales figures point to just this trend.

If Google has its way, the power to control information will essentially be taken from publishers and put in the hands of Google and companies with projects like it. In short it will be the privatization of information, exactly the reason Harvard University withdrew its full support of Google Book Search. "[There are] too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries," said Harvard's university-library director, Robert C. Darnton.

The battle is raging between companies like Google and public domain organizations like Project Gutenberg that rely heavily on donations and grants. People criticize Google because of talk that it will begin charging for access in order to sustain its project. Public domain sites don't have the capital to pay for newer books so they mostly have pre 1920's books that have expired copyrights. People shout that this trend of digitalizing books is bad because it is privatizing information, but the amount of good it is doing is extraordinary. Before digitization initiatives, people would have to buy expensive books that depreciated in value as they sat on the shelf. Now with the global reach of the Internet, literature can be accessed, read, and transferred in real time and to individuals worldwide. Books that were unavailable in the past now are available to everyone regardless of income, citizenship, and so on. Information is spreading through books and many see the merit in that.

If the current trend to digitize content continues, we will be accessing books from the Internet just as we are starting to access newspapers electronically as well. Libraries might only have computer terminals where someone can sit, read, and surf the web for the book they want to read next. We are in a shifting environment, as the Internet is quickly absorbing the world's information and putting it just a click away from anyone in the world.

Will this new method for reading help us appreciate the classic texts and newer novels, or will digitizing books cause a decline in our appreciation for the text and it's value to our global culture?

Video supplement for the Google's project, produced by Thomas McAulay

[Additional Photos: [Amazon Kindle, 2008;"Books Aren't Dead" Newsweek, 2007;]