The Case for Books: Past Present and Future by Robert Darnton

This book is a quaint, and nostalgic look at the physical form of the traditional book.  In the parlance of the bibliographic scholar the 'codex'.  The work itself is a collection of essays written by Darnton at various junctions in his career.  Some of it should be common knowledge for those in the Library field but others not initiated will find the discussions about the Google Book Search Settlement and the staggering raise in price of journal subscriptions enlightening.  Darnton also recounts the launch of his Gutenberg-e project, which was an initiative to create a series of ebooks for scholars of history.  For me this was the highlight of the read.

The only hitch however is that the metaphor of 'ebook' is nebulous and probably won't make much sense in 10 years.

Ebooks

The metaphor of 'ebook' seems to be a thin description for a chunk of electronic text that is about as long as a traditional book is.  In those terms most of the internet is an ebook of some sort.  That is to say, it can be blocked into a discrete length and packaged between to covers. Companies that produce the Ebooks and Ebook readers cling to this metaphor in order to make things sellable.  (Plus of course to add DRM to the Ebook units)

If you think about it you can pay 300$ to get a machine that reads these specially prepared files or if you boil it down to the essentials you can use any computing device (old laptop, spare computer) install a PDF viewer and you are about 90% of the way there.  The necessity of the word ebook disappears.  All discussion on the fatigue of reading the computer screen aside as this is a trivial concern.

The content type 'Newspaper' has already taken a hit, and seem to be struggling with the rules of new media.  Part of that is attributed to the decline of physical paper sales as people turn directly to the Internet for news.  The 'ebook' is going to suffer the same fate.  In time people aren't going to pony the money for specific things called ebooks and ebook readers when the goal of ubiquitous computing really revs up, and cheap Internet access is common.  If the One Laptop Per Child foundation can give away a rough and tumble laptop to an underprivileged child for under $100 how long until the developed world has as many computers as it does televisions (ie more then one per person) and thinks that everything on the internet is just information and devoid of a physical analogue.

Oh right.  In all it was a good read that helps shine the light on issues facing the library today.