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Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist and scholar, is clueful about ebraries’ potential for reference–but not quite up to speed on the recreational possibilities of e-books.

Look, even now, e-book are far more viewable than in the past, given the sharper PDA screens with more contrast. What’s more, dedicated e-book readers will improve, offering e-ink and flippable pages in time. And even the old Gemstar e-book readers aren’t impossible–I love my REB 1100. Besides, the issue isn’t just viewability or other physically related ones; it’s also choice.

I’m down here in Statesville, North Carolina, but can still pick among thousands of public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg, including my semi-exotic favorites of the moment, the works of George Gissing. Not exactly the usual fare at the Statesville library. And bookstores? Er, try Wal-Mart. Compare the the number of paper reading choices of typical Statesville residents with those of Eco, whose online biography says: “Currently Eco enjoys a prosperous life, dividing his time between a summer home in the hills near Rimini (a seventeenth-century manor that once served as a Jesuit’s school) and a residence in Milan (a ‘labyrinthine’ apartment complete with a library that houses over 30,000 books.)”

Yo, Eco! Here’s a Modest Proposal: Maybe you and other rich Brains can spend time in small-town North Carolina and see how library e-books could fare vs. paper books. Ideally you and the other Great Thinkers will think about children who can’t climb into the family Chevy for the 40- or 50-mile trip to Charlotte unless their not-so-well-off parents are in the right mood and aren’t too worn out from jobs at the textile mills. TeleRead, of course, not only calls for well-stocked national digital library system in the States and elsewhere, but also the integration of e-books into local libraries and schools–and would address hardware issues by popularizing the technology and driving the costs down. At the same time it would vastly increase the number of copyrighted e-books available to library users for free in Statesville and elsewhere.

As for preservation issues so properly raised by Eco, TeleRead would deal with them through standardized formats, redundant servers in many locations, media-integrity checking and other means–including the sheer spreading around of e-books. The more copies, the less chances of of a lost book, either in terms of media or human memory.

(Found via Dorothea Salo‘s link to an Eco lecture reproduced in Al-Ahram. Also see a Slashdot discussion.)

Note: Blogger has apparently lost an earlier version of the item I just posted. Might pop up again. Might not. Talk about the vagaries of technology! I hope that the Proprietary Format Promoters’ Forum will understand that the archive-related fears of Eco and librarians are not frivolous. Library organizations and those serving them should consider withdrawing from the Forum if it won’t live up to its actual name and get more serious about a Universal Consumer Format, which would simplify life for future archivists. Anyone want to speak up at the Forum’s March 16 public library conference?

 
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