The world is going digital, but whether that means great leaps or great falls for the written word is up for debate, says Anthony Grafton, an intellectual historian at Princeton University. "The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press," Mr. Grafton writes, but, he says, the process of digitization is not without hitches.
Undertakings such as Google's Book Search and Library Project are attempts to index and digitize as many books as possible. Some people envision such efforts as leading to a "universal library" that would include all books, articles, and documents ever made, and thus the total history of the human race, but none of the companies actually working on such projects claim to be able to do that.
Nevertheless, the "rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently," Mr. Grafton writes.
Such repositories could expand access to knowledge, but the technology has problems and limitations, Mr. Grafton says. For example, results in Google Book Search can be spotty when the user does not account for unusual spellings in old texts. Scanner operators can miss pages or scan them out of order. Also, the catalog data could be off, Google's key terms could be misleading, and, of course, copyright issues could keep hundreds of thousands of books from being added to digital archives. What's more, centuries of books produced outside the Western world remain uncataloged and inaccessible via the Internet. Mr. Grafton calls that unfortunate, especially in the case of poor societies that already "have the least access to printed books and thus to their own literature and history."
"Poverty," he says, "is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food."
Mr. Grafton also finds problems with the abandonment of printed books. Features such as smells, bindings and annotations can tell readers about who owned the books, where they came from, and what was going on during that time. "Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can," he said.
Mr. Grafton says the "universal library," should it finally be realized, will not be a clear, user-friendly, well-categorized collection of books, but rather a "patchwork of interfaces and databases," offering varieties of unpaid and paid access. Besides learning to navigate those databases, he says, serious readers will also need to understand how to use both printed and digital resources simultaneously. Digital "streams of data," he concludes, "rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you."
The article, "Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents," is available on the magazine's Web site.
