Excellent position paper on the culture of the book:
Gutenberg Parenthesis
Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) discusses this and more in the Huffington Post article today : Who says our way is the right way?
Ptolemy III had a standing order that visitors coming to Alexandria would surrender written works so that copies could be made for the Library. With subsequent fires, permanence was not granted to those collections. But, potential readership at least doubled.
Google has a standing order to accumulate books from wherever they might obtain them so copies can be made for that digital library. It is unclear what would lead to impermanence of those collections. Potential readership is unlimited.
- Kings and Dominant Corporations.
- Mobile Ships as vessels of information and Libraries with Interlibrary Loan.
- Sanskrit and Hexidecimal.
- Ideas and Ideas.
Filed under: Aquisitions, Circulation, Collection development, Ethics, History of Libraries, Intellectual freedom, Library Profession, Public Services, Research, Technology, Terminology, Web librarianship Tagged: | Gutenberg
[...] Posted on November 27, 2010 by Robert Balliot This article was posted on Best of Publib: Culture of the Book, Gutenberg Parenthesis and new ways of learning . The reaction to the content was mixed on PubLib and Web4Lib listserves, and even a bit [...]