Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine on Book Scanning and the Digital Library
From The New York Times Magazine comes "Scan This Book! " a fascinating insider's analysis on the future of the digital book, the concept of a universal library, and the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google's book digitization project."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...
Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone ? the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time."
Read the article in full, here.
Read the article in full, here.
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