Last week the US Supreme Court sided with
When I was in elementary and middle school in the early 1990’s, my father and I were huge science fiction fans, voraciously consuming the holdings of our local library and constantly requesting older out of print books from partner libraries through interlibrary loan, often waiting weeks for a given book to arrive. Given our tremendous interest in the genre and desire to help others find books of interest, especially from the vast world of out of print works, we decided to create an interactive searchable database summarizing every book we read. The goal was for each book entry to include its basic publication information, a detailed summary, major plot points, notes of interest and even links to similar books. The final database was to be distributed by floppy diskette and advertised via mail order in the back of book catalogs and science fiction magazines. A keyword search using the software would return a list of every book by a particular author, books sharing similar themes or plot devices, a quick overview of a book to ensure it was the one you were looking for and even recommendations of other books you might find interesting.
While I ultimately pivoted my energies a few years later into the nascent web that had gotten a jumpstart with the debut of
Today Wikipedia offers much of our original vision, but with the added ability of anyone anywhere to instantly expand the catalog from their mobile phone as they read a given book or translate existing entries into other languages. Indeed, Wikipedia has become the first stop for many in the internet era to learn more about a book of interest and cross-reference to interesting connections between its characters, authors and plot devices and similar works. Beyond Wikipedia, a myriad websites offer nearly every imaginable detail and interpretation of every conceivable book.
Type the title of any major work of literature into Google along with the keywords “major themes” or “plot devices” or “symbolism” and the first several pages of search results will likely be filled with everything a high school student rushing to write a book report needs to understand the ninth dimension of symbolism of a weekend homework assignment. When I was in high school, struggling to understand the dominate themes of a complex book meant physically traveling to the library to check out and bring home an actual guidebook that helped digest the work. All of the guidebooks might be checked out and if the local bookstore had also been cleaned out by the dozens of other classmates trying to understand the same book, one was simply out of luck.
The same went for actually obtaining the book to read in the first place. Reading a book meant acquiring a physical hardback tomb that in the case of a high school AP English class or undergraduate college course might mean a 600-page behemoth weighing several pounds and filling up half of one’s backpack all by itself. If you forgot to bring it home after school, you were simply out of luck. The local library might only have a few copies of a desired book that might all be checked out and the options for purchasing a book tended to be limited to whatever the local small town bookstore happened to have stocked on its shelves. An out of print book that the local library and its partners had long ago lost their copies of essentially meant the book was simply out of reach.
Fast forward to today and a few mouse clicks on Amazon or
Through the efforts of organizations and initiatives like the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books and others, tens of millions of historical books dating back hundreds of years have been digitized and made available for electronic delivery and even reimagining the book itself. A book published 500 years ago and available by appointment only in just a single rare books archive in the world can suddenly be enjoyed by anyone with an internet connection. Even publishing a book is no longer limited to the elite few with the financial resources to command a printing house – anyone can create a PDF and post it for the world to download or sell copies through any number of outlets.
In the era of free ebooks, PDF self-publishing, digitized historical manuscripts, Amazon and eBay and one-click Kindle downloads, we tend to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that reading a book took an actual trip to the library or book store and perhaps several weeks of waiting and where out of print and rare books were often beyond reach for the average person. Trying to make sense of a complex work of fine literature might take several trips to the local library reference desk and paging through thick specialized guidebooks, while today Wikipedia or a quick Google search will return a myriad summaries and viewpoints, tailored for every age and background, from an eighth grade summary on through a 400-page doctoral dissertation expounding upon a single theme and tying it into the entire history of that genre’s literature.
The Internet has profoundly changed how we consume and interact with books, placing the world’s literature and how to understand it at the fingertips of the world, accessible in seconds with a single mouse click. Such is the promise and potential of the online revolution and how it is reshaping our lives.
