“Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare.”
From a video interview with Elektrischer Reporter (click image to view).
(via Google Blogoscoped)
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Google may well be interested in the perception that it provides a comprehensive research library, but it does not need to be one to assume the role. To begin with, digital representation of a print research library can be any number of books in any presentational format.
But, let’s say that the digital print research library is infinite containing all books in every presentational format. Next we would need to imagine that the digital access would be at least as efficient as access to paper. Let’s say that the digital access can search keywords and images. Let’s also say that the search process automatically filters toward the specific book needed by the specific query, just as the traditional library classification systems do. (After all, the intent researcher doesn’t want to discover too many irrelevant books.) Let’s say Google achieves this. Lets then also say that print reading can migrate seemlessly to screen reading. Now do we have a real research library without physical books?
Not yet. Looking at the needed book we have to ask if the digital version is as legible, as haptic and as persistent as a paper version. Legibility here is visual immediacy of content, haptic is mechanism for assimilation of concepts and persistence is decades and centuries of dependable access. Is the digital research library or Google Print just an access strategy?
Digital access is the preferred route to the paper copy. Four decades of library service already confirm this. But it is the digital access that is the accessory to the paper collections, not the other way around. It would not be the first time that print has been augmented by new reading behaviors.