I have gone on record as an opponent of piracy. I know, many of you argue that piracy doesn't actually hurt authors. In terms of sales, you may even be right. But it's the principle: My speech is mine, to publish as I choose. If you want to publish for free, it's very easy for you to do so. I'll defend your right to do it, and defend your right to say any damn thing you want. Give me the same courtesy.
But I do love the free flow of speech afforded by the new digital world. After all, as a nonfiction author, I consume information as well as provide it. So let me say a few things in favor of e-everything.
Google has done me a huge favor by digitizing and making available books that are no longer copyright-protected. The New York Times deserves great praise for making its archive searchable (though its search engine stinks). Private companies have helped us all with digitized newspapers and documents, in various Proquest or Readex databases, for example. Since this is all public-domain material, I would like to see the National Archives, Library of Congress, and public libraries compete with these firms, whose databases are available only to deep-pocketed research libraries and universities. But these companies are providing great products, I must admit.
And I like the fact that people are carrying their love of books into age of the handheld device, and that buying e-books is so easy. I don't retreat from my support for public libraries and independent bookstores in the face of predatory Internet booksellers, but I don't pretend that the situation's all bad. People are buying and reading books—that's good.
I do hope the codex—the traditional printed and bound book—survives, that it will be economically feasible to keep printing them. I find them useful, especially when reading for research, when I have three fingers holding three different places simultaneously. I find them beautiful, and love scanning the spines of my library. Most of all, I find them to be lasting. Operating systems change. Code gets rewritten. I don't know how much software I've bought over the years that is completely inaccessible now. I don't want some engineer in two or five or twenty years making some "improvement" that seals the door on my library.
But I do love the free flow of speech afforded by the new digital world. After all, as a nonfiction author, I consume information as well as provide it. So let me say a few things in favor of e-everything.
Google has done me a huge favor by digitizing and making available books that are no longer copyright-protected. The New York Times deserves great praise for making its archive searchable (though its search engine stinks). Private companies have helped us all with digitized newspapers and documents, in various Proquest or Readex databases, for example. Since this is all public-domain material, I would like to see the National Archives, Library of Congress, and public libraries compete with these firms, whose databases are available only to deep-pocketed research libraries and universities. But these companies are providing great products, I must admit.
And I like the fact that people are carrying their love of books into age of the handheld device, and that buying e-books is so easy. I don't retreat from my support for public libraries and independent bookstores in the face of predatory Internet booksellers, but I don't pretend that the situation's all bad. People are buying and reading books—that's good.
I do hope the codex—the traditional printed and bound book—survives, that it will be economically feasible to keep printing them. I find them useful, especially when reading for research, when I have three fingers holding three different places simultaneously. I find them beautiful, and love scanning the spines of my library. Most of all, I find them to be lasting. Operating systems change. Code gets rewritten. I don't know how much software I've bought over the years that is completely inaccessible now. I don't want some engineer in two or five or twenty years making some "improvement" that seals the door on my library.
No comments:
Post a Comment