"J'ai vraiment eu de la chance d'arriver jusqu'ici aujourd'hui..." – Steve Fossett, après avoir établi samedi 11 février 2006 le nouveau record du plus long vol en avion sans escale : environ 42.469 kilomètres.
John Updike edits Kevin Kelly's "electronic anthill."
BY DANIEL HENNINGER Friday, June 16, 2006
There's nothing like a good word fight. Better yet, a fight about the future of the written word itself.
In this corner today we have one of the reigning wordsmiths of American letters, John Updike; in that corner, the challenger, Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly? Yes, the quite famous Kevin Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and as such a man of the future for many smart, younger, "wired" Americans who probably have only the vaguest notion of who John Updike is other than the author of books from a time past.
Mr. Updike and Mr. Kelly are both writers, but Mr. Updike's words are committed, in every sense, to paper, while Mr. Kelly prefers the pixels of the PC screen, or what Mr. Updike derisively calls "the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." Mr. Updike's dark thoughts about the electronic sunshine occurred to him on a no-doubt quiet Sunday as he read Kevin Kelly's long article in the New York Times magazine, "Scan This Book!"
This, for instance, was among Mr. Kelly's claims for the future: "From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have 'published' at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages." Mr. Kelly proposed that we deploy scanners to "digitize" and compress "the whole lot" and that with future technologies, "it will all fit onto your iPod." This "library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet--if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords."
On a recent tour of the Supreme Court building in Washington, I visited the Court's hallowed library, with thousands of legal volumes dating to the 16th century. The room was empty. "It's always like this" my host said. "No one comes here anymore, not the clerks, not the Justices." Most of what they need has been scanned by LexisNexis and FindLaw. I asked him, Would you ever read an entire case or brief onscreen? "Never. We always print out."
People "always print out" because the PC screen is an abyss. Once past three or so pages of electronic text, one feels lost.
Kevin Kelly's manifesto, "Scan This Book!," is 7,900 words long. The online version in Factiva covers 13 continuous screens of snow-white glow and black, agate type. To sit at a PC and read through all 13 screens is to hammer the neural lobes. Knowing this, Mr. Kelly naturally published it in a magazine.
Yahoo, Microsoft and Adobe are members of the Open Content Alliance of book scanners. So is Hewlett-Packard, maker of printers. Smart. Migrating Mr. Kelly's "whole lot" of the world's books to an afterlife of pixels will have HP's machines print out something people can actually read 24/7, no matter how "paper-like" screens become.
The day may yet arrive when evolution has rewired the human brain to absorb screen after screen of the same text read deep in the electronic night. But not yet. And anyway, the real threat to John Updike's world isn't Kevin Kelly. It's the beloved schools of his youth, which stopped producing real readers long before anyone had say, much less spell, "digitize." That's worth an angry speech, too.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: Print vs. Pixels
EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - The EU wants to digitalise and online the vast volumes of cultural works in member state libraries to make them accessible to all, but unless the issue of copyright and intellectual property rights are solved, the European Digital Library may consist only of books and journals published before the 1920s: http://euobserver.com/871/22383
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: Print vs. Pixels
The invention during World War II of electronic memory and of the World Wide Web a mere seventeen years ago originally as a way for scientists to communicate with distant colleagues is a further—perhaps the ultimate— evolution of the momentous transition from collective memory dependent largely on mnemonic verse to prosaic inscription on clay, stone, and paper: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19436
FRANKFURT When file-sharing services like Napster hit the scene, the music and film industries found that their awakening to the digital world was a rude one. The publishing industry, it seems, has taken heed of this experience.
Unlike record companies, which faced the double whammy of the iPod and illegal file sharing, the online market has given book publishers some breathing room.
There is no hit device for reading books electronically, nor is there a place to go online to browse or download an unbeatable selection of books. There is, however, a keen awareness among publishing executives that this day will come - and that they need to shape, rather than be shaped by, developments. ...
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: Print vs. Pixels
Expanding the original horizon of this thread:
For this year's Fall Fiction Week, Slate has invited novelists Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart to discuss a question that's been on our minds: What is the role of fiction in the age of the Internet? By "Internet" we mean not just the web itself but also the notion of constant connectivity. Today, in this age of the virtual network, the concept of being "out of reach" has begun to seem quaint, and our experience of the world has become more fluid—with, perhaps, less room for solitude and concentration. So, we've asked our critics to address the following questions: Does the new age of connectivity have any ramifications for the novel? Has human experience been altered? Have the conventions of storytelling begun to change—and if not, should they?
....I read somewhere once that in the 1960s fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem—more profound, I think—is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact. Settings shift but don't necessarily change. ...
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: Print vs. Pixels
"Kosmopolis" - an interdisciplinary literature festival
Brigitte Preissler looks enviously to Barcelona's young and innovative literature biennial "Kosmopolis" .... She points out that the director of the festival Juan Insua is aiming "for a 'free discourse without any restrictions'. Insua, who was born in Argentina, doesn't regard books as outdated, but he wants to combine traditional text formats with modern ones. This broader concept of literature is apparently shared by many in Barcelona's literary circles. A large and communicative audience listened with great interest to physicist and computer-game designer Chris Crawford talk about the narrative potential of computer games. Crawford encouraged his audience to learn about maths and programming languages, pointing out that every good artist must also learn to use certain repugnant techniques." Berliner Zeitung (Germany) further articles on the theme
Copyright deal clears way for European Digital Library
19.04.2007 [snip] EUOBERVER / BRUSSELS – An EU expert group on digital libraries has agreed to a basic model for handling copyrights for digitalised cultural publications in libraries.
The break-through deal is part of the European Digital Library initiative, launched in June 2005, to preserve European cultural and scientific heritage and make it available online in closed networks. ...
The model agreed on Wednesday (18 April) by the parties, which included major stakeholders such as the British Library, the German national library, the Federation of European Publishers and Google, covers only orphan works and out-of print works, but it has also built in elements that could be adopted for commercial publications in the future.
Orphan works are defined as publications where the rights holders cannot be identified, while out-of-print works are typically works no longer for sale. ...
For example, a new paper publisher could agree with a library to give access to older volumes. Publishers could also license books that are no longer in stock at libraries and keep generating some profits. ...
Licensing In practice, the rights-holders could license their works to one library, which would then digitalise it and make it available to users in other libraries, museums, universities and archives in Europe.
The library holding the license would be responsible for collecting money for the use of the work in other libraries and for paying the rights-holder.The works would also be available for home-PCs, for users holding a password. ...
The exact level for remuneration of rights-holders is not part of the deal, but €1 is considered as a likely payment each time a piece of work is used, ....
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: Print vs. Pixels
"Two years ago, the European Library was launched as an online service. Hosted by the National Library of The Netherlands and manned by a small complement of staff from various European countries, the project creates the possibility to access the resources of 23 national libraries, all of these coming from member states of the European Union" The Malta Independent (Malta) (via Courrier International)
...Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." ...
Pagkakaila sa Talakayan: Ang mga opinyon na ipinahayag sa talakayan ay opinyon ng mga may-akda at hindi tiyak na opinyon ng may-ari ng site at/o mga tagapamagitan. Kung kinukunsidera ng mambabasa na ang inilalathala ay magiging sanhi ng sama ng loob, kailangan niyang magharap ng reklamo sa kinauukulang tagapamagitan ng talakayan. Ang reklamo ay aaksyunan sa loob ng 24 oras, ngunit mangyaring igalang ang katotohanan na ang tagapamagitan ay maaaring nakatira sa ibang time zone. Ang paggamit ng mga talakayan ay nangangahulugan ng iyong pagsang-ayon sa Mga Alituntunin sa Paglalathala sa Talakayan.
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