Sometime around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg, then living in the important medieval town of Mainz, Germany, invented the moveable-type printing press. It turned out to be a driving force for dissemination of knowledge, helping to power the age we know variously as the Renaissance and the early modern period, and marking the beginning of the first information age.
Five hundred years later, we are poised at the brink of profound changes in how we access the printed word, how we think of publishing, and the real possibility that the contents of the world’s libraries will soon to be available to us at the click of a mouse. But the question remains: will this revolution be the seed for a new renaissance, or the death of publishing as we now know it? Or maybe both?
Participants at Google’s January 18 conference at the New York Public Library, “Unbound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World” got to hear what may be in store for us all. The clever people at Google had marched right into the Lion’s Den: holding a conference on what could lead to the end of the book as we know it in one of the world’s high temples to the published word.
On the web page as well as the printed program for the day, organizers said, “With the rise of mass publishing, more people than ever were able to access information. Books proliferated. Today, digital technology offers a similar opportunity, and the Internet now represents a powerful platform for promoting and distributing books.” This outlined the conference’s theme: addressing the full range of digital issues facing the publishing industry — new forms of the printed word, the state and impact of digitization on the industry, and the arguments for and against digitized access, from the perspective of both publishers and authors.
The debate about the “miracle” of the digital transformation and transmission of knowledge is a major controversy, and the issues surrounding it have been swirling in online forums and more traditional outlets for months, most certainly since Google announced its most recent attempt to re-define how we find and use information: a plan to scan every book ever published, and make it available online.
Clearly such a project would be a boon to researchers, who could within ten years have access to all the works of all the libraries of the world in their own home or work cubby.
Think about the implications of that.
On the other hand, there are questions about several hundred years’ worth of complicated international copyright laws, the culture of the book as object, the future role of publishers, and the (to some) disturbing role Google itself will play in controlling access to knowledge. Is it to be the gatekeeper, or Big Brother? Will it ultimately help publishers realize profits, or just find a way to destroy all forms of competition? And is the enticement of what Google is proposing to do so strong, and so inevitable, that publishers and authors (not to mention lawyers) need to get on board now, in hopes of at least helping to shape the publishing industry of the future?
Many questions; too early for all the answers. Some might argue that the main agenda now is not to imagine outcomes, but to work through what it would take to radically transform the process of by which we have acquired and stored knowledge for more than 500 years. We are in the midst of a cultural paradigm shift, and at such moments, it may be more crucial to get the right questions on the table than to worry about end product.
But not everyone agrees. Author John Updike, for one, in an article in the New York Times called “The End of Authorship,” writes that “…book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village.” Updike bemoans the notion of the Universal Library, adding, “…for some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.”
In response, one online reviewer said that Updike’s essay was “…less the work of an erudite, informed commentator, and more the work of an old man whose livelihood is tied to a moribund technology — like a guy who made a fortune selling whale oil writing about the horror of the Edison light bulb.”
Harsh words, perhaps, but for some, the opportunity of endlessly searching the history of the world’s knowledge, the trade-offs for making this happen are all negotiable. As participants in the conference pointed out, the possibility of “rented” access to books, extensive loans, and a wide range of other unconventional arrangements are all still very much part of what remains to be worked out.
We can applaud or decry Google’s ultimate motives. But surely raising this tantalizing possibility of access to everything is worth more than exploring: it is a future that many of us someday hope to visit.
A colleague recently pointed me to a little video currently up at YouTube that gently mocks an earlier generation of technophobes. Maybe a little humor and perspective in this discussion can go a long way. Or go to Google Book Search and play with the beta version of what the Google team has already “captured.” Even if you stay for just a few moments, it’s hard not to get excited by the possibilities.
And we are just getting started.
