The Future of Books

Interesting, longer article in the New York Times yesterday on the future of the printed word and how vast digital repositories will change things forever. The article, entitled Scan This Book!, was written by Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine. Books are being scanned in at a rapid pace. This work is even being outsourced to India and China where the costs are low. Simply pack up a few hundred thousand books in a shipping container, and there you go. Of course, foot traffic at libraries nationwide has been decreasing for the past ten years. Libraries have adapted to the changing norms of information retrieval, but the thought of access to huge databases of books from any screen is compelling. The article also talks about the extension of copyright and its effect on the public domain:

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn’t find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn’t know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.