The Crumpled Press | Publications | Codex in Crisis
An edition of 250, May 2008. Hand-sewn with archival-quality thread, pages: 53
Anthony Grafton sets the digitization of books into a sweeping historical context and explores the implications of new media for the ways we read, write, and store information. From the text: For the last ten years or so... the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than anything since the printing press. In great libraries from Stanford to Oxford, pages turn, scanners hum, data bases grow—and the world of books, of copyrighted information and repositories of individual copies, trembles.

Foreword, the Editors
The book you hold in your hands offers an alternative vision: one of print as an enduring, even flourishing medium in an age of digital reproduction. When we created The Crumpled Press, in 2005, we sought to re-animate the pamphlet as an expressive form. But we soon realized that blogs had filled this niche. We began to think more seriously about the specificity and durability of print: we learned the languages of paper, type, and binding. This doesn't mean that we rejected new technologies--indeed, our work would be impossible without the personal computer, the Internet, and the laser printer. Just as photography forced painters to reconsider their art, the Web has forced us to reconsider the possibilities of print.
The Web is hot: consider the links that let you skip from page to page, or the video that's racked up a million hits before you see it. A study by Harvard's Shorenstein Center recently pointed out that while we rarely think of paper as a technology, that's exactly what it is -- one of the oldest and most successful.
yes yesterday reading A Diamond As Big As the Ritz on computer screen - and not actively typing or cut&pasting, just settled in next to my cat reading - and it's not that short - I was aware of the reflection on the screen and I was recalling swhere read how print-on-paper is just a really good technology, hard to beat.
And if print is cold, it is offset by the warmth of paper. Set against the harsh glare of Vistas and e-books, paper draws you in, each page soaking up and softly reflecting light.

next to multi-tasking attention-deficit frenzy of the web ~not int to me ~rather say, the medium is what you make of it. or, someone give nuanced understanding of how we might think in terms of typing, in terms of word processing commands Undo Redo that I am familiar with. but you can read slowly and consider sth online. printed page blissfully disconnected. serene & meditative in world where these qualities ever more scarce. ~
time and resources required to publish a text like this one demand consideration in a way the keystrokes of Post and Send never will. The printed book both refines and celebrates exceptional writing. oh I don't know.

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Introduction. The Universal Library. Google's Empire. Publishing without paper? Future Reading.

Future Reading: Digitization and its discontents -by Anthony Grafton | Onward and Upward with the Arts, Reporting & Essays, The New Yorker - newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_grafton
Alfred Kazin .. One institution made his work possible: the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Kazin later recalled, “Anything I had heard of and wanted to see, the blessed place owned: first editions of American novels.."


Jean-Noel Jeanneney two years ago published a sad little volume in which he denounced Google Books as a typical American plot, at once imperialist and boorish, rather like the war in Iraq. .. Only energetic countermeasures, preferably sponsored by national governments rather than corporations, can save European literature and scholarship.

[ Jean-Noel Jeanneney's Critique of Google: Private Sector Book Digitization and Digital Library Policy
In October the University of Chicago Press published Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe, by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [1]. English speaking readers should take what Jeanneney has to say seriously (as well as the critique offered in the Foreword by Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada), both because it resonates with European cultural politics – and has succeeded to a significant extent in motivating a movement to digitize European print heritage – and because much of his case against Google Book Search serving as a building block of the digital library of the future is, in fact, compelling. ]

but it would be absurd to join Jeanneney's crusade. Enter word or phrase in any European language in Ggle bks search and see that already contains thousands texts in languages other than English.

Google partners with publishers - Cambridge University Press world's oldest publisher receives 2/3 of its page views via google
second even larger enterprise Google Library Project. drawing on vast collections Stanford, Harvard, NYpublic libraries. digitizing as many out-of-print books as possible.
problems with the scanning, OCR optimal character recognition qualitas qnalitas, inconsistent metadata.
efforts of 1960s-70s to put evth on microfilm - resulting great destruction of newspapers.


Appendix
Many virtual paths lead to the real -and Utopian- digital libraries that are taking shape across the Web. One might start with the biggest projects: Google anticipates questions about its Partners program and the Library Project; Microsoft explains its Live Search Books Publisher Program; and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France rolls out a colorful guide to Project Gallica. But it's also worthwhile to stop by some of the older, plain-vanilla efforts, such as the eminently helpful Project Gutenberg., which offers a vast range of information about collateral projects, e-book readers, much more. ... The Internet Archive sponsors the Open Library an idealistic and elegant effort "to get catalog information for every book" and make it available as a non-profit enterprise, to be complete, using new wiki software, by its own users.
...For now, the best way to get a sense of how scholars and librarians are struggling to sort the gold of the new projects from the pyrite is to visit some of the blogs run by experts, where exchanges can run long and hot. See the historian Robert Townsend's post "Google Books: What's not to like?" and the discussion it sparked.