Being For the Benefit of Mr. Byte
I don't know whether any of you heard this, but Google has announced that it will scan and make publicly available the archives of most newspapers world-wide, beginning with The New York Times and The Washington Post and ending, this side of the Atlantic, with America's oldest still in-print newspaper, the The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph (started in 1764). The scans will basically replace microfilm, you can access them for free from anywhere, and they'll be searchable.
At the risk of offending my Luddite fan base, I think this is a good thing, much like Google's earlier project of digitizing books.
Personally, I hate reading books on computers and am not at all a fan of e-books and the like. Count on me to buy the hard copy as long as they still make them. But the book project had an unintended consequence that really brought home to me the value of this kind of thing.
When Google started their book scanning project, they scanned pretty much all books they could find. This created a big uproar in publishing because authors obviously wanted to be paid for their work, and Google's offering is free. The publishers won. Because of copyright laws, Google can't make the full text of any book available that are still under copyright protection. Right now that would be anything published after 1933 and/or anything that writers who published before then renewed the copyrights on.
And here come the good news: Instead, Google has been focusing on scanning old books, especially from the 19th century into the 19-teens. And that means that for my academic projects, which delve back into major sources from the 1750s through 1890s that maybe three libraries in the world have a copy of and that I could never get my hands on without traveling to Prague or Budapest or London or or Vienna or Berlin (I know, darn) or at least Cambdrige, Mass., I now have the option of reading those books... on my laptop, thirty seconds after I found out I needed to look at them.
And that, my friends, even with its regrettable side-effects and limitations, is pretty darn great.
3 Comments:
I actually kind of like the Amazon Kindle, and I'm not ashamed to say that I would be more than happy to buy one if they made some design changes and lowered the price.
I like the Kindle ok and it's certainly handy (though I agree with you about it being to expensive for me to get right now).
But it doesn't cater to my style of reading. I jump around a lot when I read and have my fingers in four places at once and so on, and that doesn't work as well (or at all, finger-wise) with the Kindle. Also, when I read quickly, I read by the line, and that pace only works when I can look at two pages at a time.
Nice Beatles reference!
I had no idea you had been blogging with any regularity for a long time. I didn't know about 603 North Locust. Glad to see you on here, and I enjoyed the post. I have also enjoyed the Google books capability.
You're right, having a real book is far better. I not only like to flip around...I like to have conversations with the authors in the margins. I write all over most of my books. It's just too hard not being able to read comfortably, and yes, the Kindle is WAY out of my price range.
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