It would certainly be true, however it’s not a very useful or interesting article/essay because the window-cleaner manufacturers haven’t said that that their intent is to replace the use of putty in windows (as far as I’m aware, I freely admit I’ve not researched my example).

However, use the two in combination, and you have windows that stay where they’re put and are clean to look out of: they’re complementary and make the whole thing “work better”.

I think the author of the linked article is perhaps a little fuzzy on this point, or maybe he just thinks that maybe it’s not obvious enough (and I just happen to disagree).

There’s also an important point to be made about the difference between the data format data is stored in and the physical medium it’s stored on.

We have many examples of physical media that has gone obsolete and it’s no longer possible (or increasingly difficult) to read, and durability of ancient writing materials far exceeds modern data storage, likewise ease of reverse-engineering.

That has an implicit assumption of passive maintainence though: someone writes it then sticks it in a box somewhere and forgets about it until there’s no physical readers left.

Google on the other hand will be sticking it in a data-warehouse (or many), which means the hardware is continuously being replaced. Sure, if Google ceases to be a going concern then that will also cease, however if that happens no-one will be able to access the data anyway, which is the main objective of the project - access not preservation.

So, the original article makes some valid points about digital vs physical storage (ones that I happen to agree with), but their relevence is a little questionable unless you’re assuming the project is setting out to do something it doesn’t appear to be doing.

Maybe I’m misreading the intent of the article/essay, maybe he’s trying to explain why the project isn’t attempting to do that.

Regarding copyright issues: absolutely, Google is making money from other people’s copyrighted works without their permission, this sort of exploitation is exactly what copyright law is there to protect the copyright owner from.

In the last half of the article explaining why Google Books isn’t THE answer to issues he raises, but doesn’t feel it is necessary that the institution of which he is a director is a partner in the GB project. He doesn’t tell the reader that he has discussed these issues with the people at Google, and that at the moment there is/is not/possibly may be a solution. I am guessing from his lack of knowledge about the staffing at Google he hasn’t even begun these discussions. If that is the case, he is not interested in being part of the solution, and that means he is part of the problem!

Darnton does find a historical continuity between digital books and the past — is that alarming? He also points out that blogs are not necessarily some brand-new concept, but has anyone claimed they were?

I doubt if anyone can dispute that digital storage methods have gone obsolete very quickly in the last 50 years, which is the main flaw he finds in the digital library idea. It’s a lot of work to get a book into digital form; one would like the work to keep paying off for years.

Certainly the one criticism I have of Google is over the books-still-in-copyright issue and their very weaselly defense of their right to use them without compensation to the author. Darnton merely calls that a problem that’s going to continue.

So where’s the attack?

Later in in his “essay” he states that Google employs “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of engineers but, as far as I know, not a single bibliographer.” Once again, why could he not find out? The Harvard University Library is a Google Partner http://hul.harvard.edu/hgproject/index.html, so if he does not know the answer he should, or at least be able to find out, probably with one telephone call. As a Google Partner he should be talking to them about the limitations he sees in their approach instead of merely using this “essay” to take a swipe at them to further his own argument.

An essay is also quite different than a journalistic article. An essay portrays one mind thinking about some problem. The word means “attempt”, ie, an attempt to analyze and get to the bottom of a particular question or odd bit of information. The process of the thinking of the essay writer is one of its several subjects. It also has room for side issues, like the physical feel of books. Articles exist to convey information, just as a newspaper column exists to convey an opinion. Essays differ from both.

At any rate, the point of this particular essay is not “attack digital”. The conclusion the author draws is “we need both digital and real books.”

A side note on Google’s violation of copyright: the Googlites claim that since the end user only sees snippets, the digital library falls under “fair use.” Certainly the end users have that right. But the issue is NOT what the end users may do. It’s what Google is doing, namely, copying entire works in order to provide more space online to sell advertising. I am always surprised by the number of highly intelligent people who don’t see this difference.

Supports the argument, but doesn’t help the credibility.

Of course, one of the benefits of the internet and search engines is that most things on it are at your fingertips, so if there’s conflicting sources you can resolve them yourself, whereas if you’re restricted to physical copies, you may not be lucky enough to live somewhere with a correct source (or range of sources to determine which may be correct).

The author also seems to be confusing use of the internet as a grand catalogue of the content of all these wonderful research libraries as opposed to replacing the libraries themselves.

I don’t think anyone at all has ever suggested that google books will replace research libraries (other than journalists looking for an angle to write an article against), rather it’s clearly there to supplement them and to provide a limited form of access to the works to people who would never be able to have physical access.

Also there appears to be some confusion about the difference between books as a source of content and the books themselves as artefacts in their own right, it ought to be pretty obvious that a photograph of a book or a transcription of the contents of a book isn’t going to preserve as much about it in an archeological sense, just as photographs of pottery shards in an archeology journal doesn’t replace the need to keep the originals in a museum somewhere, yet the author of the article seems to think that this is some wise insight into the pitfalls of what google is trying to do.

Ebooks vs paper books, well I think it’ll be inevitable eventually, but one of the biggest barriers to ebooks is that they’re all deeply sucky. Every single attempt so far has been hamstrung by idiot design decisions like limiting how long or how often you can read, costing more than the paper version(!), being locked to a single device (hey, I’m buying the book, not the machine, it should be locked to me!), and other silly decisions.

For me, that means all the other issues to do with the medium, like battery life, digital display vs print display, heft and texture, smell, and so on, none of those even enter into the equation yet because the ebooks have knobbled themselves before they even get that far - they just plain suck as a product, let alone in competition with a product that basically is a rather mature technology that has evolved to fit our needs quite well.

Someday though (maybe even soon) someone will design an ebook system that doesn’t inherently suck, and well… we’ll see what happens then, but I can tell you that issues like durability of the physical media won’t be a factor (unless it’s extremely short), since every single example cited in that article of a transition in book technology has been to one that doesn’t preserve as well as the previous - it only needs to last long enough for “the average reader” to not care about that issue.

That looks pretty cool. Still a couple of years away, but looks promising. Thanks for the link.

Perhaps you will get the real book feel when you read your e-book on the OLPC XO2

http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20

An e-book just doesn’t seem like a real book to me yet. It just feels like a friend lent me a copy of their manuscript to read.

The Onion article(found on the web after ~10 minutes searching http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27828 ) was about congress threatening to relocate if a new capitol building was not built.