Another reason why book-based libraries won’t disappear: It’s confusing to do serious research over the network. You can’t browse while looking through the computer’s tiny porthole. I get lost in hyperspace – or is it menuspace? After a few searches and lateral jumps, I’m not sure what data I’m looking at.
The prime candidate is “video on demand”: if you want to see “E.T.,” you can punch it up and be billed later. This would hardly be a social revolution. It’s merely a replacement for Blockbuster … Utilities could deploy monitoring devices that enable consumers to have appliances turned on when generators are idle and prices are low. This, he says, would reduce the need for new power plants and cut household electric bills 20 to 30 percent.
There’s another reason why I don’t think libraries will ever go online. Electronic media aren’t archival.
Folks, I’m not holding my breath. The information superhighway may or may not become a truly transforming technology – the likes of the railroad, car or phone. But if it does, the event is many years, and perhaps decades, away.
Computers will someday compress entire libraries onto chips or discs and, thereby, open vast vistas of information to almost anyone. The trouble with this is arithmetic and common sense. A school library with 2,000 books can theoretically serve 2,000 readers simultaneously. A school library with one computer terminal that can call up 200,000 books can serve only one reader at a time. The computer creates a bottleneck. Sure, the library can buy more computers, but they’re costlier and bulkier than books. Finally, there’s common sense: Do most people really need access to, say, the entire collection of the New York Public Library?
We will continue to see dramatic leaps forward in usability of the network … Given the growing corporate interest in the Internet, it won’t be long before you can buy access to the Internet as easily as you buy computer software: in a box in a store.
Even if copyright problems are solved, the process of digitizing millions of historical books would be impressively expensive.
As the Internet begins to attract more interest, more commercial participation, and more users, its culture will undoubtedly begin to change. The Internet tomorrow will probably be different from the Internet of today. To some, this is a good thing, and to others, this is a very negative evolution. Regardless of what the change means, the Internet will begin to change.
This bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of online addicts, network neophytes, and library-automation insiders … Such a dream assumes that … books are all digitized and available on the computer. They aren’t. They never will be.
The telephone eroded the art of writing letters. Television cut into neighborhood cinemas. MTV and superstars weakened amateur musicians and hometown bands. The car destroyed urban trolley systems; interstate highways devastated passenger rail service; and airliners wiped out passenger ships. What is most at risk from wide-area networks? Our library system.