Building the Internet bookshelf

(Have I read all those books? Some, but not all. As the spunky little girl Marci says, in response to that exact question, in Cory Doctorow’s brilliant and mind-blowing SF novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?”)

There’s a wonderful long article/essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine by Wired editor Kevin Kelly about the grand global move now underway, in the hands of both big corporations and individual geeks, to digitize every book in existence. He likens the project to the Library at Alexandria (“At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then.” -- wow), but it’ll be even better, creating one giant book of everything that’ll be crossreferenced and interlinked and tagged and annotated and geekified. It’ll be the world wiki, the global textual Flickr, and I cannot wait:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

In addition to a link, which explicitly connects one word or sentence or book to another, readers will also be able to add tags, a recent innovation on the Web but already a popular one. A tag is a public annotation, like a keyword or category name, that is hung on a file, page, picture or song, enabling anyone to search for that file. For instance, on the photo-sharing site Flickr, hundreds of viewers will "tag" a photo submitted by another user with their own simple classifications of what they think the picture is about: "goat," "Paris," "goofy," "beach party." Because tags are user-generated, when they move to the realm of books, they will be assigned faster, range wider and serve better than out-of-date schemes like the Dewey Decimal System, particularly in frontier or fringe areas like nanotechnology or body modification.

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click "votes" on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.

Apart from his use of the slightly perjorative “nerd” -- these are really geeks we’re talking about -- I agree. This is a wildly exciting and optimistic vision for the future, and it’s something so rare these days that to read it is like finding an oasis in a vast desert. Kelly isn’t unrealistic -- much of his piece is devoted to the many, many obstacles standing in the project’s path. But what is especially thrilling to me is one of the underlying conceits of his vision: the idea of intellectual property moving away from the “property” -- what Kelly calls “the hegemony of the copy,” the physical manifestation of creative effort, whether a book or a CD or a DVD -- and toward the “intellectual,” the actual content and how it interrelates with the rest of the world’s “content.” It’s a vision full of hope for readers, writers, editors, reviewers and recommenders, students... everyone, really:

Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

Except for a few:

The fact is, entire industries and the fortunes of those working in them are threatened with demise. Newspapers and magazines, Hollywood, record labels, broadcasters and many hard-working and wonderful creative people in those fields have to change the model of how they earn money. Not all will make it.

Things will change. They’re already changing. Also this week, Tyler Cowen in Slate ponders whether the slow death of the independent bookstore is worth crying about. At the same time, Starbucks is holding author signings and is planning to offer cool stuff for customers to download in store -- perhaps like how Starbucks’ pushing of the movie Akeelah and the Bee turned out not to be the kind of crass corporate shilling you might expect, its pushing a new book by an unknown author could work out for the best too.

This isn’t like Wal-Mart pushing local stores out of business -- the way we buy milk and toothpaste and underwear is not the way we buy books (and music and movies). I love my Netflix subscription -- just upped it to eight discs out at a time, actually -- but I still marvel a little, every time I drop discs in a mailbox to wend their way back to a warehouse somewhere, at the inefficiency of shipping bits and bytes on a piece of plastic around the country when the whole exchange could be done far more quickly and easily online. (Until we can digitize milk and toothpaste and underwear, the same thing cannot be said about the exchange of money for those things.)

Books aren’t going away, of course -- but print on demand (which Tyler Cowen in Slate references) is, I think, gonna be the way to go, and I suspect that even traditional publishers will be doing POD more and more: what’s the point of printing thousands of books that may never sell? And it’s a spectacular solution to the “long tail” problem most books face (which Kelly discusses in the Times Magazine), the majority of its lifespan, after the (possible) initial flurry of interest when it’s first published, when it will sell a copy here and there only sporadically. Keeping a warehouse of books on hand to deal with that contingency is idiotic -- keeping an electronic file on server somewhere to print when a reader is interested is brilliant.

And there’s no need to anything to be out of print anymore, either. I’ve been working recently as a copywriter and editor for a little POD company called Cosimo Books, and I’m astonished at the amazing stuff Cosimo is suddenly making available again, in nice POD editions: cool geeky stuff, some of which you might expect, like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core and The Warlords of Mars, and Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, but also some you’ve probably never even heard of (I hadn’t), like Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things and Claude Bragdon’s A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension). Those last two are some wild stuff, and there’s no way they’d have much of a chance of ever being found and read again without POD.

Like Kelly says, we’ve still got a long way to go before we get to the great and glorious global digital online book he’s talking about. Till then, between Cosimo and the recommendations of my new favorite blog, Bookslut, I think I’d better buy more bookshelves.

(Technorati tags: books, Web, Internet, print on demand, POD)