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THE CASE FOR BOOKS: Past, Present, and Future,
by Robert Darnton.
Public Affairs. 218 pages. $23.95.
Robert Darnton, former crime reporter, professor of European history at Princeton, director of the Harvard University Library, and pioneer of e-books on the Web, has written a fascinating book on the relationship between printed books and digitized manuscripts. He doesn't see the one replacing the other, since each offers its own particular benefits, but he is worried about the monopoly of Google's digitizing millions of books and charging fees to read them.
The formula is easy: "Digitize and democratize." Open the world's books online to anyone in the world. Establish a real Republic of Letters that was created and celebrated by the Enlightenment during the 18th century, albeit then for the rich and privileged. But accomplishing the task remains formidable.
Humanity's come a long way from writing to scrolls to the codex (pages you turn rather than unroll) to movable type in the 1450s to electronic communication. But who gets to control the latter? True, all texts are ultimately unstable and mutable, but what happens when Google favors private profit over the public good?
A class-action suit is now being reviewed in the courts in terms of Google's monopoly, copyright laws and authors' rights. In 2006 Google made deals with the New York Public, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and Oxford's Bodleian libraries, and had digitized more than 7 million volumes by November 2008.
But how do we get to them? Will libraries pay annual fees? Will prices rise at the whim of the market? What restrictions will arise between the spectator and the screen?
Real issues continue to exist. Libraries can no longer afford to shell out $20,000 a year for one scientific journal. The budgets of university presses keep getting cut. How are younger scholars to publish to get tenure? No book, no tenure: publish or perish.
Darnton is working on his own e-book, the topmost layer with its basic narrative, then deeper layers that scrutinize the material in various ways, a kind of vertical reading with links leading out from links into the web of cyberspace -- along the lines of the "hypertext" model pioneered in the 1960s at Brown University and now in common use. Could e-books be the answer to scholars' needs?
In this engaging book of essays, Darnton considers bibliographies, the search for reliable versions of Shakespeare's texts when there is no source or origin, ideas of reading in various centuries, the use of commonplace books in which people jotted down quotes from what they read, and the history of the book itself as a physical object in terms of authors, printers, sellers, distributors and censors. His own book expands and deepens as he continues.
I first read Darnton's "Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment" in France, when I was working on a book on Hawthorne and mesmerism. He is a thorough, graceful and well-documented writer and a lover of the 18th century. And he loves books: the shape, the smell, the feel. They will never be replaced, he asserts, and I agree. We must digitize, but we must be wary, lest the page as electronic impulses evaporates in cyberspace.
Sam Coale (samcoale@cox.net), Wheaton's English department chairman, still reads books. Lots and lots of books. He reviews some of them here.
