pCon

Don’t deny the change. Direct it wisely.

Soon most if not all libraries will be facing quandaries similar to that of the NYPL, owing to the devices on which more and more people are doing more and more of their reading. Already at least a fifth of all book sales come from e-books, and the numbers are rising fast. Total e-book sales in January 2012 came in close to twice those of a year previously, and were more than ten times the figure for January 2009. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 21 percent of all Americans have read an e-book in the past year, with the proportion predictably higher among the young. Nearly all of the most popular English-language titles are downloadable, including millions of free books in the public domain, mostly digitized by Google Books. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell hundreds of thousands of copyrighted titles for a price similar to or lower than that of the equivalent paperback. When the Harry Potter novels finally appeared in electronic versions this spring, they racked up $1.5 million in sales in just three days.

This technology cannot simply substitute for the great libraries of the present. After all, libraries are not just repositories of books. They are communities, sources of expertise, and homes to lovingly compiled collections that amount to far more than the sum of their individual printed parts. Their physical spaces, especially in grand temples of learning like the NYPL, subtly influence the way that reading and writing takes place in them. And yet it is foolish to think that libraries can remain the same with the new technology on the scene.

Let me pose a question that will itself strike some readers as a sign of severe cultural decline: why should most libraries still own physical copies of out-of-copyright books—that is to say, for the most part, books printed before 1923? Yes, millions of Americans, mostly poor, still lack Internet access. (According to the U.S. Census, in 2009 somewhat over thirty percent of households did not have a home Internet connection.) Millions of others, mostly older, do not know how to download books, and millions more feel uncomfortable reading on a screen, as opposed to paper. But all these obstacles will largely disappear within twenty or thirty years.

Already 90 percent of Americans live in households with at least one cell phone, and within a few years we can expect all cell phones to have internet access. The knowledge of how to download and to manipulate basic files has already become a necessity for most working Americans. As for “screen reading,” not only does comfort with the practice depend heavily on age, but the quality of screens will continue to improve. Remember that the first commercial e-readers came out in the United States less than six years ago, and the devices’ technical quality, as represented by the newest Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, has already improved radically in that short space of time, while prices have fallen dramatically. It is not at all unreasonable to suppose that in another couple of decades cheap and ubiquitous reading devices will have screens that look, to all intents and purposes, identical to paper. Already this May a New York Times tech columnist, reviewing the new generation of devices, quipped that “in some ways, the only reason to stick with dead tree books these days is nostalgia”—today’s hyperbole, tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

Specialized scholars will always have reasons to consult the original paper copies of books. Marginalia, watermarks, paper quality, binding, and many other features of the physical book that digitization cannot always capture offer valuable clues about how the books were produced, circulated, and read, how they created meaning. But this sort of research mostly takes place in a small handful of leading research libraries, and it involves a small number of readers. Far more readers, of course, appreciate physical books for their aesthetic qualities: the feel of the paper, the crisp look of print on the page, the elegant binding, the pleasant heft of the volume in the hand, the sense of history embedded in a venerable edition that has gone through many owners. But this sort of pleasure, real and meaningful as it is, is harder to justify financially, as resources grow increasingly scarce.

Some critics warn that digital media are more fragile than paper, and fear that as digital formats evolve, older files will become unreadable. These fears, too, are misplaced. Yes, digital media are fragile, but they are also far easier to duplicate than paper. The history of the Computer Age has been the history of exponentially more efficient digital storage capacity. In the mid-1950s, an early IBM hard drive stored 3.75 megabytes of data—roughly the amount now required to digitize a short book—in a cabinet that measured five feet by five feet eight inches by two feet, and weighed hundreds of pounds. Today the most advanced, commercially-available “secure digital” cards can store 500,000 times as much data in a package that measures 32 by 24 by 2.1 millimeters. Which is to say, a digital copy of the entire book collection of the Library of Congress—some thirty-three million volumes—can easily fit into a small shoebox, making it simple to produce thousands of backup digital copies of every book ever printed. As for format, the very existence of vast quantities of useful information encoded in particular formats makes backward compatibility a necessity, and guards against the danger of obsolescence. Internet browsers today can still read nearly every Web page ever created. Current versions of Microsoft Word can read Word files from the 1980s. Nearly all PDFs ever created remain readable in Adobe Acrobat and scores of competing programs.

Given these facts, it will inevitably become harder and harder for most libraries to justify keeping physical copies of digitized public domain books on their shelves. The books take up space. They must be kept at a proper temperature. The process of checking them out, checking them in, and re-shelving them involves human labor. All of these things incur significant expenses, at a time when most library budgets are shrinking. At present, a large constituency still prefers paper books to e-books. When this constituency vanishes, as it most likely will within two or three decades, the arguments for eliminating the physical objects will come to seem far more pressing, particularly for smaller libraries whose patrons make relatively little use of older books. Less than twenty years ago Nicholson Baker could lament, in an eloquent New Yorker article, the disappearance of physical card catalogues from libraries. (Among other things, he criticized electronic catalogues for their “neolithic screen displays and excruciatingly slow retrieval times,” as if the technology would never improve.) But how many readers are still troubled, in any serious way, by the disappearance of those old catalogues? (Recently the Yale University library unceremoniously junked its old card catalogue drawers, filling a large dumpster with them.) How many will be troubled, twenty years hence, by the disappearance of the physical books?