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The Great Library of Amazonia
By Gary Wolf
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60948,00.html
(This story will appear in Wired magazine's upcoming December issue, 11.12. )
"...Manber types "Boss Tweed" into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.
...With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and exploration. It provides a new form of map.
...Kahle hates the idea that when people think of information, they think only of what's accessible via Google. "Seventy-one percent of college students use the Internet as their research tool of first resort," he says, citing figures from a 2001 PEW Internet Study. "Personally, I think this number is low. For most students today, if something is not on the Net, it doesn't exist."
And yet most books are not on the Net. This means that students, among others, are blind to the most important artifacts of human knowledge. For many students, the Internet actually contracts the universe of knowledge, because it makes the most casual and ephemeral sources the most accessible, while ignoring the published books. "It's shameful," Kahle continues, "because we have the tools to make all books available to everybody. You need three things. Technically, you need storage and connectivity. Storage is easy. For under $10 million, you can store all published works of humankind back to the Sumerian tablets. The last time they tried this was in Alexandria, and they had an innovative storage mechanism, too. They had papyrus, and papyrus was astonishing compared to clay tablets. But we can do better than the Alexandrians, because we also have connectivity. I have traveled in Uganda and in rural Kenya and seldom been more than one day's walk from an Internet caf?. It is technologically possible for most kids in the world to have access to all the books in the world."
...Kevin Kelly, a Wired founding editor who spent part of his summer trying to establish a private cooperative library of digital books. The digital titles in Kelly's library would match the physical books on his shelf. "The idea of ebooks was to do away with paper," he says. "But really, you want to add dimensionality to a physical object rather than take it away. You want an enhanced physical world."
...This shifts power away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and toward the people who offer access to information about where this material can be found. Information about books, not ownership of copyrights, becomes a new center of power. Manber is correct when he says that Amazon's Search Inside the Book is not an ebook project. It is merely a catalog. But a decade of Internet history proves that the catalog is exactly what you want to own.
...Amazon's Alexandrian scheme hinges on the insight that physical books can be turned into electronic databases and then ˆ in the retail process ˆ turned back into physical books. This is one of the boldest maneuvers yet in an intense commercial competition, but for all its cunning, this is a civilized, even civilizing war, one that builds libraries rather than burns them. "
Director of Image Resources & Copyright Management
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem www.imj.org.il
Board of Directors, the Museum Computer Network www.mcn.edu
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