Monday, May 15, 2006
When you have a moment...
Read this story in the New York Times Magazine (hat tip: Joe Miller) on the project(s) to digitise all the books produced by humankind. What's interesting about this story is the discussion of the implications beyond just making books available, and the idea of the 'liquid book' and what it means:
Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in teh second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
The article goes on to consider the copyright issues, and possible solutions to the copyright issues: solutions that might involve the development of lists and registers of ownership. It's not just a 'ra-ra isn't this wonderful' view: it is careful to point out that saying that Google's 'opt out' approach (we'll scan and you, copyright owner, can tell us if you want your stuff removed) is ok has broader implications - 'Should you as a creator be obliged to find and notify each and every geek who scanned your work, if for some reason you did not want it indexed? What if you miss one?'
And when you've read the article, think about a couple of things:
- What does the 'liquid book' mean for writing books? Will the authors of the future build in tagging, linking, etc into their books too? Will books be written differently?
- What do the changes rendered in copyright law in Australia, as a result of yesterday's announcements, mean for projects like the Million Book Project or Google Book Search?
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