First published in Biz2, 06/00.
Just when you thought the Internet was a broken link shy of ubiquity, along comes the head of the Library of Congress to remind us how many people still don’t get it.
The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, gave a speech on April 14 to the National Press Club in which he outlined the library’s attitude toward the Net, and toward digitized books in particular. Billington said the library has no plans to digitize the books in its collection. This came as no surprise because governmental digitizing of copyrighted material would open a huge can of worms.
What was surprising were the reasons he gave as to why the library would not be digitizing books: “So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television’s preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-illiterate chatter, shortened attention spans, and a near-total subservience to commercial marketing. Where is the virtue in all of this virtual information?” According to the April 15 edition of the Tech Law Journal, in the Q&A section of his address, Billington characterized the desire to have the contents of books in digital form as “arrogance” and “hubris,” and said that books should inspire “a certain presumption of reverence.”
It seems obvious, but it bears repeating: Billington is wrong.
The Internet is the most important thing for scholarship since the printing press, and all information which can be online should be online, because that is the most efficient way to distribute material to the widest possible audience. Billington should probably be asked to resign, based on his contempt for U.S. citizens who don’t happen to live within walking distance of his library. More importantly, however, is what his views illustrate about how far the Internet revolution still has to go.
The efficiency chain
The mistake Billington is making is sentimentality. He is right in thinking that books are special objects, but he is wrong about why. Books don’t have a sacred essence, they are simply the best interface for text yet invented — lightweight, portable, high-contrast, and cheap. They are far more efficient than the scrolls and oral lore they replaced.
Efficiency is relative, however, and when something even more efficient comes along, it will replace books just as surely as books replaced scrolls. And this is what we’re starting to see: Books are being replaced by digital text wherever books are technologically inferior. Unlike digital text, a book can’t be in two places at once, can’t be searched by keyword, can’t contain dynamic links, and can’t be automatically updated. Encyclopaedia Britannica is no longer published on paper because the kind of information it is dedicated to — short, timely, searchable, and heavily cross-referenced — is infinitely better carried on CD-ROMs or over the Web. Entombing annual snapshots of the Encyclopaedia Britannica database on paper stopped making sense.
Books which enable quick access to short bits of text — dictionaries, thesauruses, phone books — are likely to go the way of Encyclopedia Britannica over the next few years. Meanwhile, books that still require paper’s combination of low cost, high contrast, and portability — any book destined for the bed, the bath or the beach — will likely be replaced by the growth of print-on-demand services, at least until the arrival of disposable screens.
What is sure is that wherever the Internet arrives, it is the death knell for production in advance of demand, and for expensive warehousing, the current models of the publishing industry and of libraries. This matters for more than just publishers and librarians, however. Text is the Internet’s uber-medium, and with email still the undisputed killer app, and portable devices like the Palm Pilot and cell phones relying heavily or exclusively on text interfaces, text is a leading indicator for other kinds of media. Books are not sacred objects, and neither are radios, VCRs, telephones, or televisions.
Internet as rule
There are two ways to think about the Internet’s effect on existing media. The first is “Internet as exception”: treat the Net as a new entrant in an existing environment and guess at the eventual adoption rate. This method, so sensible for things such as microwaves or CD players, is wrong for the Internet, because it relies on the same
sentimentality about the world that the Librarian of Congress does. The Net is not an addition, it is a revolution; the Net is not a new factor in an existing environment, it is itself the new environment.
The right way to think about Internet penetration is “Internet as rule”: simply start with the assumption that the Internet is going to become part of everything — every book, every song, every plane ticket bought, every share of stock sold — and then look for the roadblocks to this vision. This is the attitude that got us where we are today, and this is the attitude that will continue the Net’s advance.
You do not need to force the Internet into new configurations — the Internet’s efficiency provides the necessary force. You only need to remove the roadblocks of technology and attitude. Digital books will become ubiquitous when interfaces for digital text are uniformly better than the publishing products we have today. And as the Librarian of Congress shows us, there are still plenty of institutions that just don’t understand this, and there is still a lot of innovation, and profit, to be achieved by proving them wrong.