Off Course-On Target: Books—the NEW old medium

Why is it that whenever something new and innovative comes along, one of the first reactions of the press and pundits is that it means the elimination of whatever went before? When television was first invented and began to become popular, the “conventional wisdom” was that it meant the end of radio. Who would want to listen to a talking box when you could have talking pictures?! Well I don’t know about you, but when I last checked (this morning) radio was an even more viable medium than ever.

TV certainly changed radio and how we listen and interact with it, and I’m not sure there are too many households sitting around the radio listening to programs in the evenings. But far from being eliminated, it seems that radio is currently experiencing its own revival via the likes of Internet-based radio and satellite radio. And for me, podcasts are an extension of radio, bringing back a flood of a new, more vibrant and relevant form of “talk shows”. This is all very different than in the past to be sure, but to my way of thinking, it is also vastly improved, reaching more people and having a greater impact than ever.

Similar predictions have been made about other innovations: eLearning meant the end of classrooms and teachers, online sites meant the end of newspapers, DVD’s meant the end of movie theaters...and the list goes on. After observing this phenomenon for many years now, I can only conclude that it is an odd characteristic of human nature, and we just need to try to learn more from these lessons of the past and match these realities to our predictions and expectations.

Earlier this week (January 21, 2007), I read about this very same syndrome being applied to some new developments. In this case, Bryan Appleyard made some interesting commentary in his UK Sunday Times column with the headline “Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book”. This was his reaction to the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to scan the content of a majority of the world’s books and make this content discoverable online.

In case you were not aware of these developments, here is a quick review of the past few years:

Back in 2003 Amazon started to “unbind” books it offers with the introduction of their “Search Inside the Book” project which will help you find the exact page and associated text and context you are looking for. They have gone on to add programs such as “Amazon Pages”, which “unbundles” these digital books so that customers can have online access to any page, section or chapter, and a program called “Amazon Upgrade” which will allow customers to "upgrade" their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access.

Google got involved in 2004 when they introduced a program they initially called Google Print to “help users search through the oceans of information contained in the world's books.” In December 2004, Google extended this idea when it made a deal with five libraries—NYPL (New York Public Library) and the universities of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford—to scan their stocks, making their contents available online, and renamed the service Google Book Search. Ultimately, they predict that some 30 million volumes will be involved and they claim to be scanning about 3000 books per day, a rate that would translate into more than 1 million books per year.

Microsoft and MSN have also been working on similar “book search” projects that scan printed content and make it accessible online. In November 2005, they made a deal with the British Library to scan 100,000 books from its vast collection with over 25 million pages to be scanned the first year alone. And in June 2006, the universities of California and Toronto agreed to lend their collections of out-of-copyright material held in trust. In concert with the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft will scan and index the materials for use in its Windows Live Book Search. This month (January 2006) they also plan to add books from the New York Public Library, Cornell University and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine, which are being scanned by robotic machines.

More recently (and what prompted the Times article) were some comments from Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe who said at the “Unbound” conference at the New York Public Library,
"We are working on a platform that will let publishers give readers full access to a book online." From this, Appleyard concluded that "We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years."

Of course, Appleyard may well be right that as the content of books becomes available to us online (as I would believe is inevitable and will happen much faster than predicted), it will change both the way and the amount we interact with physical books. But how the form or medium upon which text is transferred has anything to do with how it is used and interpreted is beyond me.

Appleyard goes even further with his “sky is falling” style of predictions to say:

"...it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or, ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn't educate and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become."

Wow!

But fortunately some reality prevailed in the form of good commentary from several other sources. A UK colleague of mine, David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services, who was also speaking at Unbound said, “Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read. It’s the readers who will have the final say.” Here here! And from down under, Stuart Corner on ITWire provided reactions to Appleyard’s comments that I would strongly agree with.

As Appleyard notes, even the British Library sees this digitization and access to content to be a great thing:

“Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, refuses to see this in apocalyptic terms. With 100,000 of her books being scanned by Microsoft this year, she regards the ultimate digitisation of the library’s entire 150m-item collection (journals included) as 'a wonderful outcome, though I suspect I’ll be long dead by then.'"

I certainly share the concern for any bias towards either American or English books, literature, or culture, which is raised here, however I would agree with Brindley that this is highly unlikely to happen. Brindley notes that search engines are still in their infancy and that even Google has competitors who are bound to eat into their monopoly. She goes on to say that “improved technologies will make search results more like indexes, working more precisely as knowledge providers than simple information dispensers.”

I was just delighted to finally see some acknowledgment that the majority of the world’s content is NOT yet available on the internet at all! Books are but one great example, especially those in most libraries. Then there are related issues of the degree to which most information in magazines (and especially journals) are still difficult to discover online. Yet to listen to some people, you’d think that if content doesn’t show up in a search result, it doesn’t exist. I, for one, can’t wait to have this mass transfer of content to digital forms occur and for it to be accessible for mass discovery. And I suspect that as noted in my upcoming podcast “Living in a World of Exponential Change”, this will happen MUCH sooner than expected. Now we just need to shift the focus from searching to finding! But that’s a topic for another posting.

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Off Course-On Target

Where unexpected paths lead to great discoveries.

January 24, 2007

Books—the NEW old medium

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