The Bookseller.com

7th August 2008

GAYLE FELDMAN

Gayle Feldman is The Bookseller's US correspondent.

Where is the digital world taking us?

17.04.08

Spring has come to New York, as has National Library Week. Ditto the Edinburgh lady beloved of librarians everywhere. J K Rowling's been having her days in court, in the copyright infringement action she and Warner Brothers have brought against RDR Books and the Harry Potter Lexicon. As a website, author Steven Vander Ark's efforts had won Rowling's praise, but going from virtual to print is a whole different matter.

The case isn't exactly of the magnitude of the most famous twentieth-century book trial in a New York district court – "The US vs one book entitled Ulysses", which was adjudicated seventy-five years ago – but we are living in a very different century, and Rowling is arguably the best-known author living in it, so it is important. Let us hope the judge this time is as wise as John Woolsey was vis-a-vis Ulysses [Editor's Note: Woolsey concluded that Ulysses was not obscene and could be sold in the US].

The case throws the spotlight once again on to the question of questions: where is the digital world taking us, and where are we taking it? How do we prevent digital from fatally cannibalizing print, and print from stifling the innovation of digital? The Rowling story wasn't the only such making the rounds this week.

Cambridge and Oxford and Sage are suing Georgia State University for collecting and collating material from their books and journals into university website course packs. The AAP is backing the plaintiffs in a suit that seems to be the first of its type, involving electronic rather than photocopied bundles pieced together by a not-for-profit without asking permission or paying any license fees.

Then there was the story about business prof Philip M Parker's 200,000 "books", or more accurately concoctions-between-covers generated by artificial intelligence and algorithms from information in the public domain. He is now trying to tweak the algorithms to spew out the Stepford wife equivalent of a romance novel.

All of this had my head spinning as I attended a panel convened by the oldest library in the city, the New York Society Library (granted its patent by George III) for National Library Week. Fitting that an expat Brit, Michael Gorman, who served as president of the American Library Association in 2006-7, duked it out ever so politely over the digital divide with James Neal, the Columbia University Librarian (Columbia, originally "King's College", is one of the top five research libraries in the US).

Gorman's opening shot counter-intuitively brought us back to "the manuscript age, where you couldn't trust what you saw". With moveable type came "a period of fixity, authenticity, stability, and texts you could trust". Is it now to be replaced, he wondered, "by an era when everything is once more in doubt, when things are falsified, de-authenticated, and when they also vanish?" Nobody has quite figured out, after all, how to preserve a website (unless, of course, like the Harry Potter Lexicon, it is turned into a book).

Information isn't the same as knowledge, although much of our world is so deafened by the white noise of information overload that it confuses the two. It's the library's job, Gorman argued, to preserve the human record and to teach "lifelong literacy" by fostering critical thinking, an appreciation for authenticity and expertise.

Neal, on the other hand, spoke of "access" and "productivity" and "technology" and "experiment" and above all of "content" – a word notably missing from Gorman's vocabulary. In the library world, he saw "apprehension and fear" about "chaos and unpredictability." But "a disruptive technology enables the larger population to do what only an expert could in the past. Chaos often breeds life while order breeds havoc."

Columbia now spends over a third of its book-buying budget on digital access. For some other large libraries, the figure is an eye-popping 50-80%. Neal argued that "the book limits the amount of information that we can transmit".

Gorman, however, cautioned about exactly the kind of cutting-and-pasting currently being transmitted by Georgia State. "The whole point of the book is the knitting together of information into knowledge", rather than the "shattering" of it into discrete and debased atoms.

I have a feeling that Joanne Rowling would agree.  

Gayle Feldman J K Rowling Home RDR Books