scan book ultimate library
In Foundation, Issac Asimov wrote about a planet at the edge of the galaxy devoted to storing the entire contents of human knowledge in a great Encyclopedia Galactica, so that when the galactic empire fell the ensuing eternity of the Dark Ages wouldn’t be quite as dark and eternal.
Orson Scott Card’s elaborations* on the storage and cataloguing system of such an immense library are drool-worthy, at least for nerds who think Wikipedia-style cross-referencing via links is incredibly sexy.
Maybe the library to end all libraries could happen:
In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.
The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.
Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?
All that stands in our way is a mire of copyright laws that prevent texts rotting in publishers’ warehouses from being made publicly available, and of course the fate of living authors’ careers if their books were more easily pirated than sold.
And whether we want to give up the nice, comfortable hand-held paper book. At the moment paper is arguably more archive-worthy than most digital options (after my hard drive bust I’ve rediscovered respect for the ephemeral nature of digital media).
I can’t help wondering, is an online Alexandria going to be better than all the previous versions? After everything has been scanned and all the copyright issues worked out and we stand before the multi-city blocks of wikiTerminus, are we actually going to do anything remarkably new with it? For that matter, will the great collection of Everything Ever Written even be worth reading? Don’t forget, we’re talking all the shite that’s ever been written, like Danielle Steele novels and the works of Kant**, not just the Grand Masters of science fiction***. There’s a reason books go out of print.
Somehow I don’t think potential uses are an issue. When I buy a paper journal I always look for archive-quality acid-free paper. It’s not because I think somebody in the distant future is going to want my thoughts, so much as I just like the idea that some thought is being given to my small immortality.
Knowledge for future generations bah humbug. Archiving for its own sake is what the feverish Google quest is all about. It satisfies the collector’s soul, a storage place for everything and everything safely stored.
* The story is “The Originist,” from the Asimov tribute anthology Foundation’s Friends, 1989. Like 15 years before Wikipedia!
** Ha ha just kidding, I love you Kant.
***Bias here? Noooo.
I like this post but I didn’t blog it on time, and thus you can’t read the linked NYT article for free anymore. Sorry about that, it was a cool article.
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I can’t think of any reason why the ink and paper version of Everything Ever Written would be preferable to the degital one, save some misplaced pre-21st century romanticism.
On the other hand, I can think of plenty of reasons why going digital is better:
*Broadened access: you can’t bring the kids from poor 3rd world countries or inner cities to the Library of Congress, but you can bring the electronic library to them cheaply.
*Pirating is overratted: This whole pirating business is so WAY overblown by the Music/Entertainment industry, I think this deserves its own sub points:
1, media sharing does NOT hurt overall content sales–the increased exposure for indie bands/movie makers will only help them. Why wouldn’t the same work for individual writers? I don’t understand the logic that, ther easier it is for an creator of content to distribute her product, somehow the harder it is for her to make money. The rapid proliferation of blogs is a great example of how things can and should be different.
2, media sharing does NOT hurt even the dinosaurs like MGM or Sony. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’m pretty sure that, since the internet thing happened, and especially since P2P software like Napster and Nutella made it easier for people to pirate and share music/movies/programs/etc., the sales of music/DVD/software bundles have actually increased. I can’t explain why but I’m not surprised.
3, people don’t realize that, sooner or later anything and everything ever written, shot, sung or played will become public domain at some point anyway. What is important is not how we should stop pirating of digital media, but is how the means of sharing and distributing the same media and making them widely available should not be stopped.
* Potential use not an issue!? What?
People don’t just hit the books to casually browse, most people go to the library to find the book with the specific info that they’re looking for.
If you got a beef with junk books, with all books available digitally Danielle Steel’s of the world will all go the ways of spam.
And I can’t think of anything more immortal than digits and anything more ephemeral than hydrocarbon chains.
*And so much more. Ironic, what you talked about “archiving for its own sake,” “collector’s safe storage,” etc, I was thinking of paper books rather than digital ones. Given (and I do think that this is a given) that digital books is more practical (smaller, cheap, durable, coffee-stain free) than paper books, I just don’t see how paper books are better beyond its obviously superior sentimental values.
Somehow I was thinking that people had the same debate right around the time when hand-written scrolls were replaced by printing-pressed books.
Digital, the way of the future yeah yeah, but I’m pretty sure today digital storage methods are still shakier than print on paper. It’s a problem that will probably be solved, though, as will the issues of copyright and piracy and what qualifies as public domain.
Basically, this project is too cool NOT to happen, those issues are going to figure themselves out or get steamrolled eventually.
However, I don’t agree that digital formats are more practical. Books will always have one step up for one simple reason; accessing electronic data requires a medium (data-thru-device-to-eye-to-brain) and printed paper does not (print-to-eye-to-brain).
Anyway, I was overzealous in declaring potential use of the massive library not an issue, since obviously it’s the potential uses that make it so exciting (in addition to the archivists’ pleasure in collecting). Maybe by cross-referencing the whole works of humanity with links and making it searchable, they’ll be able to find patterns. Make discoveries, predict the future, it’s like finding the meaning in Pi. Definitely cool.