Michael Gorman, ALA president-elect, is once again trashing e-books–this time in the June 3 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he rants in a Q&A against Google’s “atomizing” books.
Why can’t Gorman be more straightforward and say, “I want an anti-Google law passed to protect aging, Luddite librarians”? The real issue is that the search engine is just the start–that eventually the full text of most any modern book will be online.
Rants like Gorman’s sometimes make me thank that certain librarians are cheering on the fossils in the Copyright-Entertainment Complex at times. Old farts in librarydom and copyrightdom alike really don’t care for change. (Thanks for the clip, Alev.)
Part of the material in the Chronicle:
Q. What’s wrong with Google’s scanning millions of library books and adding them to its search engine?
A. If you’re going to spend millions of dollars and you’re interested in getting research materials to scholars, wouldn’t it be better for Google to spend money improving their own business? … Wouldn’t it be better for them to work on, quote, cataloging the Web, so you can get the kind of results you get from a library catalog?
The second big objection to me is that they say they’re digitizing books, but they’re really not, they’re atomizing them. In other words, they’re reducing books to a collection of paragraphs and sentences which, taken out of context, have virtually no meaning. They may contain some data, but it’s of very marginal utility. I mean, my view is that a scholarly book is an exposition. It begins at the beginning and ends at the end. It cumulatively adds to your knowledge of a topic and presents an argument.
The TeleRead take: You can try to catalog the Web, and an outfit like the Librarians’ Index to the Internet certainly offers a valuable service. But the Web keeps changing. Links don’t endure forever. The real solution in the end will be a formal digital libraries to augment the wonderful dynamic Web as it exists today.
The libraries could use stable links and OpenReader software to allow more context than paper libraries permit. Meanwhile keep in mind one of the major limitations of paper libraries, geography. You’re SOL if your library lacks a needed work and interlibrary loan will take forever. This isn’t exactly the best way to encourage students–with term paper deadlines–to do comprehensive research.
As for the “atomizing” of books, don’t blame Google. Blame students and academics who are too lazy to do their full research. Libraries and the publishing world could help by working together to get full texts on line, via Google or otherwise–maybe even, gasp, a well-stocked national digital library system. Luds like Gorman don’t help their cause when they agitate against such progress.
