A Literary World Without Books

Author Unknown

This is something about which I have written before, but lately it has been on my mind at least once a day. What with the news stories about the Google Books suit, the publishing industry, and e-reader developments, I can hardly stop thinking about it. Working with last week's meme reminded me that I am definitely not the most technologically up to date scholar in the world. I still don't own an e-reader! I know I have "ebooks" saved to some program through my campus library, but I never consult them after I save them. Don't I spend enough time on the computer?
Some recent blog posts about the subject have got me thinking about this so-called future where the world of print is gone. What would a library look like without books? How about a college learning experience? Is this ultimately a good development (saving trees, providing infinite access around the globe, decluttering)?
I can see some of the advantages of this potential development. I cannot count the number of times I wished professors would have scanned book chapters instead of forcing us to copy them, for example. I do hate, hate, hate moving books - they are way too heavy (btw, a solution to this problem is to move them inside wheeled suitcases instead of boxes). From a commuter student's perspective, having digitized collections is golden - I cannot pop into my school library whenever I want. Having easily searchable databases (which have been around for a while) is awesome. Some of the practical objections I used to think about (what about checking out books in local libraries?) are being thought through with e-reader programs that act like a netflix for books.
Given all this, I have also read about some serious obstacles to a bookless world. And not just the "how can you curl up with a computer" type objections. These objections directly affect graduate students and teachers everywhere. For the full post visit The Little Professor. To pick up on a few of her thoughts, though, consider the following questions:
1) What about documents, manuscripts, and books that cannot be digitized because they are too fragile to withstand the process? And a huge part of scholarship for these works is handling them in person, in seeing the documents up close, and understanding the impact of the physical act of reading on these texts. No matter how you slice it, we will still need special collection libraries for these items.
2) What about access - right now if your institution cannot afford access to a mass database full of information, you could presumably purchase the book you need or find a *gasp* hard copy of it in another library for loan. Moving to a world of complete digitization would present challenges in this regard, not the least of which would be -
3) Everyone would need a computer or e-reader device - there are still thousands of Americans alone without even a desktop in their homes. It remains to be seen if these devices could be subsidized by the government.
4) There are still huge practical problems with collections that can be easily digitized and accessed - consistency in the scanning (some are almost unreadable), formatting (I tried to save and print political cartoons from a database once and they came out horribly stretched and fragmented, and the quality of the scans for documents that have unique attributes (fonts, plates, images, page formats, etc).

On a more personal note, I recently experienced an interesting brush with the practicality of using an e-reader to read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. In the book club session that I helped out with recently, one of the women said that she got half way through the book with the e-reader, but that because of Rushdie's writing style it was becoming unbearable to continue on the device. She bought the actual book for the last half and found it much more enjoyable. What she meant was that Rushdie's sentences often go on and on, with little structure and a lot of repetition. I did not even consider it, but it would be difficult to read it on a small device screen. On top of this, it was challenging for her to "flip" through the book when we wanted to discuss a certain passage or event. People sometimes forget that authors often take nearly as much pride in how their books "look" as they take in the actual work - many still stand over the printers to make sure the vision comes out the way it is supposed to. In any case, it was an interesting experiment with book clubs and e-readers.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of challenges which lay ahead for a world without books (and does not even broach the subject of a digitized publishing process), and neither is it a complete list of the advantages of such a world. I encourage you to contribute your own pros and cons about using technology for reading, for keeping collections, and for the act of scholarship.