îclutching the intangibleî
The new
Institute for the Future of the Book appears to be searching for the epistemic break that will define the relation of the paper book to its electronic analogs. That is a difficult business. The transitions are occuring in many layers.
Better to take the FotB approach and look away from the churn of formats and into reading behaviors. The cascade of reading modes clearly indicates the future. The cascade illustrates the persistence of the parent reading modes and, at the same time, allocates the hybrids and composites . The habitats of composite reading skills are all around us.
But the virtual library and its composite presentation confirms, rather than denies, the future role of print. If projectile predation set the neurological future of the hominids, the paper book remains the tangible conceptual work that our specie tosses across time and cultures. Which is not to deny the silicon based neurologies their own scrapbooks.
google the virtual library
“But Paul LeClerc, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library, sees Web access as an expansion of libraries’ reach, not a replacement for physical collections. “Librarians will add a new dimension to their work,” Mr. LeClerc said. “They will not abandon their mission of collecting printed material and keeping them for decades and even centuries.”
The New York Times
reports the Google agenda to image research libraries. The time line is a decade.
What they are actually accomplishing is a browser version of ILL or interlibrary loan which usually never requires a whole text reply. The Google research library data base also confirms the continuing role of the paper collections, illustrating their capacity to compound meaning via multiple reading modes.