[iDC] Media dies more slowly than some would like

[Rick Prelinger]

Trebor's kind invitation to kindle a thread has filled me with trepidation, largely because my experience in the areas germane to this list has been preeminently practical rather than theoretical.  I've been a moving image archivist since the early 1980s and have been trying to go into archival recovery for almost ten years, but the thrill and rewards of putting films online for free has kept me hooked on archives and goaded me into thinking about meta-archival issues.  I was a new media author in the laserdisc and CD-ROM days and published fifteen discs in collaboration with Voyager, hoping to free historical film from the traps of academicism and nostalgia.  And for the past several years I've been an amateur outsider librarian, co-founder of a private research library open to the public in San Francisco, a large physical collection that is rapidly developing an online analogue.  In truth I'd also have to admit to being an independent scholar: I've done a Vectors residency, lecture frequently on archival access, and write curricula for cinema studies students on archival tracks. 

Those of us who have spent time in and around what people call "new media" (I'm happier calling it "emerging media," because I don't know what "new" means any more) have seen technologies come and go, often before their potential can be realized.  When a technology dies its relics inure to media primitivists who quietly work with them, often in a localized or artisanal way.  I'm thinking of my friends in Detroit who resolutely only listen to music that's on 8-track tapes, the immortal Pixelvision underground, or the performative-projection artists in San Francisco.  Many technologies that were once touted as revolutionary or at the very least disruptively problematic revert to being quaint antiques, perhaps even becoming part of a quietly hissing steampunk infrastructure.

But some media forms are not going away fast, despite what everyone seems to think.  Radio broadcasting (if you accept San Jose 1909 as its place and date of inception) is 98 years old.  The pipes it passes through change and the business models governing its production and distribution evolve, but it works today much as it has worked since the early 1920s.  Radio has not become quaint, and it encompasses both artisanal, local practice and monopolistically-controlled mass medium.  

And then there are books.

I'm a librarian two or three days a week, and I love books, though I don't feel at all nostalgic about them, nor about libraries, musty paper or handwritten marginalia.  I'm not romantically infatuated with books (see David Weinberger's excellent critique of Anthony Grafton's recent New Yorker piece at (http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-nov19-07.html#book).  But I think David's characterization of books as fetishistic objects and of libraries as nostalgic repositories is well-articulated but unfounded.  Recent experience reveals to me no inherent reason why ebooks should render printed books obsolete.

Three years ago my spouse and I opened up an appropriation-friendly private research library in downtown San Francisco with the help of sixty friends who came and spent eight days shelving the collection (much of which had been deaccessioned by other libraries).  We had no idea who would use it, and in fact hardly anyone came during the first three months.  And then suddenly we were mobbed -- by art classes, independent scholars, artists looking for text and images to reuse, and the simply curious.  Even though we were three blocks from the (much larger) public library, people chose to come and use our materials.  Since then we have had over 3000 visitors.

What we learned was that browsing and reading have endured and appear to be robust; that the younger and more digitally-oriented users bond to print with passion; that our visitors prefer the serendipity and discovery enabled by navigating a space of physical objects over the simulation of discovery offered by online resources; that query-based collections (as most online libraries are) inhibit randomness, discovery and surprise; and that while people use databases or Google to answer specific questions, they come to us to find what they are not looking for and leave fulfilled and happy.  All of this was quite unanticipated and a great surprise.  It is, of course, empirical and anecdotal, but it's led us to believe that the assertion that physical books are on the point of obsolescence is faith-based and self-fulfilling.

There is absolutely no evidence that ebooks will replace printed books unless we want them to.  In fact, the obsolescence of physical books isn't a technical or philosophical issue; it's preeminently a business and marketing issue.  Will the publishing industry try to force readers to buy and use text digitally?  The potential economies of digital distribution would argue that this is likely to occur.  If it does, this is not a judgment upon print's relevance, nor is it the fulfillment of an anti-nostalgic drive.  It's just business.  Ebooks won't disrupt the publishing ecosystem; they're arising out of an attempt to remake business models.  Similarly, the recording industry moved from analog vinyl to digital CDs in an attempt to migrate to what it thought would be a read-only medium and to raise the price of music.  The unintended consequence -- that it became easy to copy bits, was disruptive.  But the technology was deployed to update business models.

It's true that Google is the first and last resort for many students and information seekers.  It's true that university libraries are less used than they were.  And this is one powerful reason why ebooks may multiply -- even the richest university libraries cannot function at a loss, and it costs dearly to accession, catalog, shelve and circulate printed materials.  Stanford is building a new engineering library that will be bookless.  The strongest argument for doing so is reduced labor cost.  Why have large libraries welcomed Google as a partner despite the problematic contractual provisions?

Digital text promises new functionalities to which I look forward; that's why we are scanning 8,000 of our public domain items in partnership with the Internet Archive.  If networked annotation, textual mashups and open, sharable textual datasets leave the lab and go mainstream, it won't be because physical books are outmoded, but because copyright owners perceive a market.  (In the nonprofit and academic worlds, we can try to help monkeywrench this by leveraging public domain works to build new services and hoping that an accessible, shared public domain forces copyright holders to move in the same direction.  But right now the opposite is happening, as Microsoft and Google build separate enclosed gardens of public domain books they're paying to scan.)

I also await convincing evidence that networked annotation will scale.  It flourishes in many small instances, but it also flounders due to lack of interest and specificity.  Again, many annotation projects haven't escaped the labs in which they were created.  Others, like the annotations attached to our films online at the Internet Archive, are characterized by a few peaks of insight and lucidity rising out of a landscape of noise.  Though many scholars and teachers make heavy use of the online films, they don't annotate or discuss them online, I think because the overall discourse is heavily fan-oriented and focused on likes and dislikes.  And I am not convinced that hyperlinking will turn into a mainstream activity, unless it is forced upon people as part of standards-based education.  We construct a image of the future book based on features we perceive and desire today; this means we eternalize the present.  But we cannot build castles out of today's bricks without risking instability.

The publishing industry, like the recording industry, is its own worst enemy.  Instead of taking a deliberative and receptive attitude towards technology, they are allowing their actions to be dictated by blind, often unthinking fear.  They would do best by being customer-centered and ensuring that readers could obtain texts in whatever formats they chose with minimal difficulty.  In my gentrified San Francisco supermarket I recently counted over 70 varieties of olive oil.  Why is the publishing industry all hung up over the evolution of digital text, and why do we reify the assertion that print has to die out?  Can't both exist and flourish, along with audiobooks, large-type books and other formats that may emerge?

I cite our admittedly subjective personal experience because it indicates to me that not only are books not going away, contrary to what David Weinberger believes, but that they are engaging people in new ways as we move towards a digital culture.  I'd venture to say that physical books will start to look and function differently in a digital context, and that the form and shape of ebooks will be influenced by the persistence of physical objects which, after all, practically define persistence.  How exactly this will happen might be a good subject for discussion.

Rick


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Rick Prelinger
Prelinger Archives    http://www.prelinger.com
P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622 USA
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