Terrible pun, sorry.
Anyway, in a recent post on Google Books, I linked to a fab New Yorker essay; Future Reading.
It takes a grand, historical view of libraries and the increasing sophistication of book cataloguing from Alexandria to Google; it’s a fascinating view of attempts to manage the ever increasing volume of humanity’s knowledge and ideas.
The essay also neatly outlined a nagging doubt I’ve had about the privatisation of archives, but I couldn’t sum up succintly;
“The materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow. This is unfortunate, because these very societies have the least access to printed books and thus to their own literature and history…
…Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million.
…Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.”
And just to really depress me, I’m currently half way through reading Rainbow’s End, which offers a stunningly dystopian view of book digitisation.