… plus stacks of Philosophy, Sociology, short stories, essay collections, collected reporting, poetry, works of religion, biographies and autobiographies…

All of these things adorn my desk, dresser, bedside table, floor, coffee table, kitchen table, radiator, and any other relatively flat surface. I’d have my cat balance them on her head if she wasn’t so grumpy about it.

And, the extreme anxiety of leaving the house without something adorned with print.

From as far back as I can remember I have been surrounded by the word.  True computers were there too, but they seemed something which fascinated me in a negative way.  I was always interested in the fact that people were sharing their lives through the computer.

But the computer has never been something sublime to me. It is easy. The word is difficult. I’ve been trying to find a profession which would allow me to work with books and words on a full-time basis. I thought scholarship was it, but I wasn’t ready to compromise my polymathy for a life behind a magnifying glass.

Librarians–of course they deal with books. What could be more elementary, the word “book” is contained in their name. But it only seems that my younger colleagues are trying to run away from books as fast as possible.

The perfect sentence is something which gives me the most profound joy. I sometimes think about trying to create them myself. The greatest compliment I can give to a writer–and I will give this to Pasha Malla whose The Withdrawal Method is moving me in profound ways right now–is that they make you want to be a writer.

But that is going to take another 5 years (giving myself 5 years for my 7 years of university writing. Even though it is bad I feel like I came out a better writer then my peers). What career in the meantime?

I find now, because I can say with confidence why I enjoy in writing, even to the point of finding flaws in very successful writers, that I have a desire to move into editing and publishing. I never really felt like I had to actualize my love of reading in this way before. I was merely content to read and hope that someone would pay me to do so. So perhaps a new path, after a few years of walking down the wrong ones.

And by the time I write down the title of The Idea of Europe: from antiquity to the European Union, I’ve already lost interest. I am not going to spend time trugging my ass to the library every day and read from the various 20 page parts which are relevant to me.   Maybe I could have just read the Introduction and the relevant chapters, took notes, and had been productive from sitting in front of a computer.

But who can read it there are pages missing? It is not that I want to necessarily read every page, but I don’t have a choice in what I can’t read. The Algorithm does. And though the Algorithm can make compromises here and there it is not perfect because it is not me. Depending on the strength of the application of the rules you can see more–sometimes even an entire work. But sometimes you only get

The question then becomes, how much would you pay to read the entire book.  I don’t think I am necessarily ready to pay a large amount for access to a database for music, but I would pay quite a large sum to have Google Books serve me every book I would want to read.  It is fast, it displays the books well.  And yes it messes up metadata for old books. It is not actually the new God, despite some popular opinion.  But going to a true research library is a horror.  For someone who actually cares about looking at to old editions of Charles Dickens, the 1871 and the 1873 editions, the academic research library is much more like the library in Eco’s nightmares.  As a member of the public, not a student, I pay a 60 dollar alumni fee to use the print collection.  If I am just a regular person I think I would pay $120.

And these are not even delivered to my house.  And yes, us priests of the book know that schlepping your ass to the library stacks builds character.  But I’d think that actually using the books more effectively and productively builds a more useful kind of character, no?

I don’t think that there really is a danger in the intellectual tenor of the Internet.  Reading on the Internet will be different, not better or worse, and it is our job to study and interpret the differences.  But I wouldn’t  say that people are fleeing away from books towards the Internet.  Those who can successfully navigate it see its other benefits and we can’t wait for books to catch up with us.  People want to have access to books in the Internet culture.  Students enjoy the convenience of having books they mostly likely are not reading anyway, and those who are more senior citizens of the Internet often express that we wish to  have an opportunity to read more books online and through our devices.

The fact is that the companies who control what culture has become, a commodity industry, have an interest in this relationship of manufacturing physical objects.  But I am ready to offer quite a large sum to have everything on a subscription basis.  And I promise I will continue to buy books.  The best books you need to have by hand to read multiple times, to write in the margins.  To take to the mountains and to the bathroom. But we have to own up to the fact that, like every other form of human production, most books are really bad.  Or to be more generous, most books have little relevance to what I am thinking about right now.  Maybe a chapter, maybe an essay out of a larger collection.  Maybe chapters 3 and 5 and section 2 of chapter 8.

People already have the option of paying $120 for limited access to a library. And yes, the access is limited by its physicality because you can only carry and deal with so many physical books at time.  And they don’t even deliver for that price.  I would be willing to pay more, more than $200 for sure, and I’d have to think about what the maximum I’d pay would be.  If the Government in the person of its Libraries cannot get this done, why should I not be ready to pay Google Books?

I agree, Google is making its money off of the backs of millions of dollars on public investment.  So it is unfortunate that Google is going to do what everyone wants them to do: give us a repository of books.  All books, because we already have all music, all video.  Those who are in love with information in a long form (like there are music aficionados) will pay money to have books delivered to us wherever and whenever, and in ways that we find relevant to our own work.

The majority of the article is a good recap for those who haven’t been following the debate closely, but I specifically wanted to touch on two parts.

The first is her idea, which I believe is original because she doesn’t cite anyone, of “infogration”:

As well as trying to ensure that information is accessible to all, Google is involved in trying to make sure that people are accessing more and more information via the Web. Google has done this by pioneering a brilliant new model of business expansion, introduced here as infogration. Infogration is radically different from the traditional model of horizontal integration, which involves buying up competition, and vertical integration, which involves buying upstream and downstream industries. Infogration involves capturing different aspects of physical and social reality and representing them with digital information. In other words, infogration involves the integration of aspects of the world in to the medium of information into which targeted ads can then be placed.

Much more insidious than the regular process of horizontal and vertical integration, this infogration actually involves the gobbling up of our personal lives by corporations in the business of information. Our personal info, our thoughts and feelings, even our health records and genetic code. As Waller notes, one day we will see that we have the genetic marker for obesity and be targeted for weight loss ads wherever we search.

While I appreciate the social aspect of the Internet, it seems like you take any organic naissance of a means of social interaction, and sooner or later it gets sold out to the highest bidder just for the aggregate of information built up. YouTube is a prime example, but any of Google’s acquisitions would do.

The second discussion of Waller’s, and one I have begun thinking about a lot lately, is the differing concept of “information” used by Google in their business goal to organize the world’s information, and by Libraries as exemplified by the ALA’s mission statement.

However, how can these two uses of the information support such dissimilar goals: to make information accessible and sell advertising on Google’s part, and to support democracy on the part of public libraries. Waller quotes Roszak’s The Cult of Information: “‘A fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are “information”.’” She briefly discusses the modern use of the word “information”, and then writes in a very important passage the following (my emphasis):

Google is concerned with the free flow of digital information, information that is accessible anywhere anytime. In other words, Google is concerned with the form of the information. In contrast, public libraries aim to provide access to information in order to strengthen democracy. This requires a balanced flow of information and some sort of ordering of significance. In other words, libraries are concerned with the content of information. Google is only concerned with the content inasmuch as it is enables targeted advertising.

This quote explains exactly why I have been so dissatisfied with my colleagues in libraries, and what I believe the problem to be. With the rise of computer systems for accessing data, librarians have given up on their historical mandate of supporting democracy by not only supplying “information”, but by supplying the kind of information that will allow citizens to come to independent judgments and participate in a healthy democracy.

We have given up on trying to offer some balance, quality control, and yes, even ordering of information based on educated judgement, in favour of ever increasing flows of information, technological utopianism, and a willingness to let corporations solve our problems instead of using our own professional judgement.

On the one hand, I am a child of the computer generation through and through. I was on [Bulletin Board Systems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_Board_Systems) when I was 12. From there I upgraded to the text based [Hamilton Freenet](http://www.hwcn.org/) when the Internet first became accessible to a wider public. In elementary school I always followed around that one teacher who ran the network, and in high school I seriously considered studying computers in university.

But a few good teachers at the end of high school and I feel in love with academic subjects like English and History. Slowly over [OAC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Academic_Credit) and five years of a degree in Philosophy I became a reader and writer.

I always loved the reading more, and I now read much more widely than I every did, from Rousseau’s *[Confessions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Jean-Jacques_Rousseau))* to Milton Friedman’s *[A Monetary History of the United States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Monetary_History_of_the_United_States)*. But I never really have had a subject to write about that took up as much as my interest as hacking on a computer does. In many respects I think communication on the Internet can be shallow, pointless, and a waste of my mental energy, and I would much prefer being in a book. But I admit I am an Internet addict.

I think if I could help people—particularly those in academia—help one another find what they consider good and interesting, that would make me happy.

So I think I am seriously considering moving my focus to becoming something of a web or technology librarian. But not exactly. I think I have been progressing that way. [Copyright](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright), [Information Literacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_literacy), [Media Ecology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology), for me these all point to something: what is the Internet doing to those things that have been dominated by the success of printing technology, those being scholarship and learning.

The end. Right now I am touching up my CSS and HTML skills. And I am planning to write a paper on adapting this particular open source networking site in academia. Expect some design changes here soon.

The first part of the book details that myth, from Marshal McLuhan to Alvin Toffler to Nicholas Negroponte. What I am enjoying right now is the second half, which goes on to show that other technological developments where lauded in their time with the exact same language that we use to describe the Internet.

Any of these quotes sound familiar:

The Telegraph

• “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.”
• “Our whole human existence is being transformed.”

Electrification

• “It is no longer a matter of choice whether or not one shall become acquainted with the general facts and principles of electric science. Such an acquaintance has become a matter of necessity. So intimately does electricity enter into our everyday life that to know nothing of its peculiar properties or applications is, to say the least, to be severely handicapped in the struggle for existence.” (does this call for Electronic Literacy anyone?)

The Telephone

• the harbinger of “a new social order”
• “a moral obligation for a considerate husband and a good citizen.”
• This would lead to an acceleration of democracy in politics and social life since we are all equals on the telephone.
• others welcomed the likely breakdown in class and family boundaries.

Radio

• “the greatest force yet developed by man in his march down the slopes of time.
• “a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.”
• “it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded.”
• “Every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University.”

Television

• “a torch of hope in a troubled world” (seriously!)
• will make “the attendance of classes in any one place…as obsolete as the buggy of twenty-five years ago”
• “television will usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth”
• The new medium was predicted to be so potent that writers began to speak of a “pre-television” era and admonished those who were foolish enough to cling to the “habits of thinking” that characterized this time as “trapped in another anachronism.” (Library 2.0?)
• “Television is no instrument of imperialism. It belongs to the people as does radio. It comes at a time in history when the world needs to have an eye kept upon it for the welfare of civilization.”
• Additional examples give new hope for community television in low-income areas, for direct contact with candidates for electoral office, and for a transformation in the quantity and quality of citizen communication with government officials.
• “an “information highway.”

What Mosco is arguing is that, sooner or later, all of these new technologies become banal. He notes at one point that the average home now has 8 radios. Where the telephone was once seen by people as some kind of mythological device, now we do not think twice about it. In the 1930′s television was to be this great democratic and educational tool–now we see it as exactly the opposite.

So too with the Internet. This honeymoon many of us are still having with the Internet, and certain sub-technologies on the Internet (Blogs/Tagging/Social Software will save the world!) will quickly come to the end as new youngsters cease seeing the technology around them as something sacred, but as something purely profane.

Yesterday as well I spent the day reading a soon to be published book of philosophy, and wrote my little review in the late night. This morning I got an acknowledgment from my editor, and I had a chance to re-read what I had written.

It made me think how connected to this older kind of librarianship the act of writing book reviews continues to be. I admit that it is also connected to that aristocratic ideal that librarians would be the judge of good books, but I think I really enjoy looking over a book, considering why it would be good or useful, and giving my little judgment of its contents in order that other people can inform their decision.

I have always felt that I was more of a reader than a writer, or that I enjoyed the process of reading over the process of writing. But I do find it easy to write about books, regardless of how connected I am to the Internet or whatever is supposed to replace books.

I ask this questions as I read a great book by Patrick Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry Into Cognitive Authority (1983). It examines in detail the process by which we come to recognized others’ ideas as correct ones. It follows another really great little book by Wilson called Two kinds of power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control (1968) which has a really great section on how it is that we decide on the subject of a work. Both of these are highly relevant, and both of them I discovered for myself.

Or the theoretical works of Henry Evelyn Bliss, particularly The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences (1929). Difficult, yes. Dense, yes. Interesting, thought-provoking, yes. Another great book–this one was suggested for a class, but by a teacher which explicitly goes against the current–is Living with books: The Art of Book Selection (2nd ed. 1950) by Helen Haines. What a wonderful book of bibliographic love! Is basically a manual on how to look at books, how to evaluate them, how to weigh other’s evaluations of them.

So I question why things like there are ignored. I am sure there are more of them, but I don’t know them all. Why are important abstract works of this nature ignored? I am sure that the concrete nature of the profession has changed, but are we not qualified to evaluate the foundations of that work? Are they no longer applicable to today’s world? I would argue no.

To tell you the secret, it is my plan to glean ideas from these old works to inform my future writing. Not only will I seem well read (because I will cite them), but in reality all of these new ideas people pass around have foundations in older works.

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark‘s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning

If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.

Dilevko has gone through the history of publishing and the current state of the publishing industry, dominated by huge media conglomerates and excessive advertising and cross-promotion. Opposed to this is a selection of books weighed by time, evaluated through numerous reviews and analysed by literary experts. For the corporations, it does not matter that the books are “good”, but only that they are read (or that they win one of the hundreds of book-awards that now exists). Risky artistic books are slowly becoming a rarity.

The question the class continually reaches is this: either of these positions is inauthentic. Why is it any better that one group of people tell us what to read over another group. The choice he presents, and I think it is a great conclusions, is this: it is true that someone is going to tell you what to read. Would we rather give that power to a corporate process which cares only of the bottom line, or to the evaluation of history? Would we rather be marketed to, or would we rather take a wait-and-see approach to what books will be considered worth of recommendation.

As for the question of the “superiority” of supposing that we can educate people, Dilevko quoted Reading Lolita in Tehran to the effect of saying, why do those better off think that those worse off do not want to read good books? Is this not more discriminatory, thinking that everyday people will not or cannot read classics?

Now, discuss.

Dear Werke:

I am sorry I had to take you from the shelves, in all 12 volumes of beautiful cracking covers and yellowing paper. Apparently your lack of barcode signaled that no one had checked you out in almost 20 years. I am not a rare book expert, but I am pretty sure, given the death of Schiller in 1805, you are a first or second edition.

To the rest of you, some of you are even older than the Schiller and some of you are relatively new scholarly works that have obviously not been opened once since you were purchased. Some of you were donations in memory, ex libris Professor Long-Since-Passed-Away.

Most likely none of you will ever be read again.*

Sincerely,

Steven

* Quoting Steven’s new supervisor in charge of the logistics of moving things to the up-town storage facility: “If we do our jobs correctly, hopefully no more than 3% of all these works will ever be requested again.”

But, at least while alive, at any one time someone’s thoughts are never static. Particularly when engaged in a major ongoing investigation and inner debate, we often believe one side of an issue over another. Not just in one’s lifetime, but while walking down the street. In debating with others we are won over to their side in one debate, and maybe at a further time we keep our convictions.

We have this almost religious belief, however, that one’s books are one’s final thoughts on a subject. Who’s to assume that someone hadn’t changed their minds after their last book, died with a death bed conversion. Should we not say “Augustine’s thoughts” but only “Augustine’s writings”? And what about the possibilities of deception, irony or even self-deception, fighting a position we don’t want ourselves to believe. Do I even know my position in a self-conscious fashion?

David McGee from the Burndy Library at MIT presented to us the manuscript of Michael of Rhodes, a unique look into the intellectual life of a fifteenth century commoner. Lost for 400 years, McGee exhibited the manuscript as the life’s experience of a common mariner who worked his way through the ranks from oarsman to the highest non-noble post in the Venetian fleet. And, in turn, that life explains some anomalies about the manuscript itself.

Filled with mathematical problems, tables of calendar dates, navigational calculations and ship schematics, the book contains much of the knowledge required to outfit and direct both individual ships and entire fleets. Curiously, however, the work lacks technical detail and contains errors in many places. McGee contends the work is not an instructional manual or a personal aid but was used to exhibit the seasoned mariner’s knowledge to the nobles, merchants, and important citizens of Venice. The highest posts in the Venetian fleet were won in highly contested elections and the manuscript was created to set Michael above similarly experienced Venetian citizens. The expense of such an undertaking illustrates the life-long zeal of a foreign commoner to insert himself into the highest positions of Venetian society.

Those attending were amazed by the condition of the manuscript, save for the final, well worn, page. Containing Michael’s illustration of St. Christopher bearing the Baby Jesus, it was often touched for luck on Michael’s long voyages around the known world.

Now Google has joined the party [party?]. At google.com/bannedbooks, you can use Google Book Search to explore some of the best novels of the 20th century which have been challenged or banned.

Oh really? Google, your left hand promotes “Celebrate your freedom to read”, while your other denies the same rights to the Chinese as you censor your search results.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger? Can you get Orwell down from the shelf for me, Big Brother?