The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future Paperback – Illustrated, August 3, 2010

There are several heroes in this book, but only one villain. The villain is, of course, Google, with its plan to digitize millions of books from research libraries and to make them available on the web to the public, for a profit. Google was challenged in court by a group of authors and publishers for alleged breach of copyright. For Robert Darnton, who expressed his views in numerous articles published by the NYRB and other journals, market forces cannot be trusted to operate for the public good. Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, he sees a great missed opportunity: "we could have created a National Digital Library, the twenty-first century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria." Instead, "we are allowing a question of public policy--the control of access to information--to be determined by private lawsuit."Turning to the heroes of the book, the first character we meet is a fictitious one, who appears at various junctures in the text. Marian the Librarian, as she is called, answers queries about her job by explaining that librarianship "is all about money and power". She lives in a dangerous world of CIA plots to take all newspapers out of libraries, of books baking in chemical solutions to prevent their pages from turning into crumbs, and of civil lawsuits such as the Google Book Search case brought to the district court for the Southern District of New York.The case against Google's potential abuse of monopoly power is especially strong because, as people familiar with scientific publishing certainly know, it has happened before. Commercial publishers discovered they could ratchet up the subscription price of professional journals without causing cancellations, because once a university library subscribed, the students and the professors came to expect an uninterrupted flow of issues. This has resulted in the skyrocketing cost of serials, with the Journal of Comparative Neurology claiming the hefty price of $25,910 for a year's subscription. As a consequence, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographes now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing.For the author, lending his voice to Marian the Librarian, "To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale, for it would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere."The second hero of the book is Robert Darnton himself as a professional historian who made pioneering contributions to the history of books. Let's call him Bob the Historian. As he defines his field of inquiry, the purpose of the history of books "is to understand how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thoughts and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years". Initially, the problems took the form of concrete questions in unrelated branches of scholarship: What were Shakespeare's original texts? What caused the French Revolution? What is the connection between culture and social stratification? By asking new questions, using new methods and tapping new sources, the history of books turned into an exciting and thriving discipline, akin in its ambition and span to the history of science or the sociology of knowledge.Bob the Historian believes libraries should preserve as much printed material and other media as possible. He thinks that "future scholars may learn a lot from studying our harlequin novels or computer manuals or telephone books." As his own research has shown, "almanacs and chapbooks were the most popular kind of printed matter in early modern Europe--so popular, in fact, that libraries did not deign to collect them." Likewise, commonplace books where people copied valuable quotes and remarks are sites to be mined for information about how people thought in a culture based on different assumptions from our own.Bob the Historian's passion fort the archive goes beyond the printed material. He notes that we have lost 80 percent of all silent films and 50 percent of all films made before World War II. And he refers to ongoing projects at Harvard to archive email exchanges and web content for future generations to study. His plea for conservation is fueled by his belief in the social role of the historian: "Any attempt to see into the future while struggling with problems of the present should be informed by studying the past". Although the study of history does not afford lessons that can be directly applied to present circumstances, immersions into the past can provide a useful perspective on current and future events.The last hero of the book is the same author in a different capacity: as a lover of books, bewitched by their texture and smell. Robbie Bookworm, if we dare call him so, recalls with emotion his first visit as a freshman to the rare books library at Harvard and his discovery of marginalia annotations of Emerson by Melville. Digitized images on a computer screen will always fail to capture crucial aspects of a book. "When I read an old book, I hold its pages up to the light and often find among the fibers of the paper little circles made by drops from the hand of the vatman as he made the sheet--or bits of shirts and petticoats that failed to be grounded up adequately during the preparation of the pulp." And to escape the vagaries of the present, there is always the temptation "to retire to a rare-book room and count watermarks".

In this loosely structured series of essays, author Robert Darnton again and again emphasizes the theme of openness in regard to the free flow of information. Early in the text he cites the quote found at the entrance to the Boston Public Library: "Free to All". The problem is that Darnton is director of not the Boston Public, but rather that library across the river, the Harvard University Library, arguably the most exclusive and closed library in the world. Access to the Harvard Library is reserved only for the relative handful of faculty, staff and students of Harvard, outsiders cannot even enter the building. And the Harvard Library is notorious among other academic libraries for not sharing its resources, it has a reputation of serving only its narrowly defined clientele.Ironically, access to the collections of the Boston Public is also highly restrictive: the vast majority of its collections is non-circulating and in closed-access stacks. Darnton speaks of the condescending attitude many academics have toward (mostly female) librarians, and yet Darnton himself continues the hallowed tradition of Harvard appointing male non-librarians as director--speaking of condescending! Indeed, many of the contradictions that can be found in this book are precisely because Darnton is not a librarian and has never worked in a library as a professional. The reality is that research libraries have been suffering from an extended crisis that has led to the content of their collections becoming increasingly inaccessible.As others here have pointed out, Darnton's target of wrath here is Google, and he has come out forcefully as a strong critic of Google's book digitizing efforts. For Darnton, libraries somehow provide assurance that access to information will remain "free", something that commercial enterprises like Google cannot guarantee. In setting up this argument, Darnton completely loses sight of the radical transformation that digitizing and the Internet has introduced in providing unfettered access to information. In spite of his having worked on digital projects himself, Darnton from his ivory tower fails to recognize the profoundly democratizing impulse of large-scale projects like Google Books. What were once available only to the highest level scholars in rabidly guarded rare collections, are now thrown open for anyone in the world to download and use in their own research. In like manner, Darnton also throws up red flags regarding Google's efforts to provide access to millions of "orphan books" existing in copyright limbo. These books have little or no commercial value and yet fully antiquated and dysfunctional copyright laws prevent the valuable content of these books from being made more available. Google has fashioned an elegant solution to this problem, one that will provide untold benefits in making poorly accessible but valuable information more available.For a variety of twisted reasons Darnton is against all this. Why? Why would a scholar library director oppose providing better access to information? In a word, Darnton is an excellent representative of "vested interests". In spite of libraries being mired in crisis and their ongoing inability to provide better access to their collections, Darnton wants libraries to continue to be the monopolistic gatekeepers of information. Google, digital information, and the Internet represent a serious threat to a two-thousand year tradition of the library's monopoly to access to information. This also helps to explain why a researching scholar would defend the totally dysfunctional copyright laws that currently exist only to restrict greater access to information. Copyright by its very nature protects the intellectual property of an individual, and should not exist longer than 25 years (representing the anticipated career of an author). That copyright has been extended to almost a century now is totally ludicrous in terms of the benefits to society and to open access to information.If read with such a critical eye, Darnton's small tome can be read with some benefit, as a case-study for understanding why some entrenched academics and librarians are so critical of Google's efforts in revolutionizing access to information. What it comes down to is seeing through the rhetoric of Darnton's "Free to All" for what it really is: "Free to All Faculty, Staff, and Students of Harvard", vs Google's understanding of "Free to All". As with the old aristocracy of Europe's Ancien Regime, it is important to see through this rhetoric and recognize that, in the end, Diderot and d'Alembert would have embraced Wikipedia.

This book is a collection of essays about books. Darnton is enthralled about the possibilities of Google Books, because it has the potential of providing a worldwide library available to all those with access to the internet, but he is also concerned with Google being a monopoly, and he is realistic about copyright holders who may think twice about wanting to make all of their books available online without reasonable compensation.Darnton is not worried about the future of books in codex form, since it will be very difficult for modern technology to make something easier and more portable and convenient than an actual bound book. He envisions a world where there will be an increasing variety of ways to access information.Darnton is an 18th century European scholar, and this comes through in some of the essays. He shows how even journalists from that era wrote stories that were based on faulty fact finding, just as internet bloggers are often accused of today.The essays in The Case for Books are placed in reversed chronological order, but they show how well Darnton has been able to see into the future of books. The last essay is of value because it provides a powerful proposal for schools to consider the history of books as an area worthy of study.This book is well worth reading, and it will make you love books more, both bound and unbound.

I'm enjoying reading Darnton's book. It reconciled me with paper books!

一九世紀アメリカの代表的な図書館長は歴史家で、その典型はジャスティン・ウィンザーでボストン公共図書館長を務め、アメリカ図書館協会の会長にも就任した。歴史家は包括的に文献を展望し、歴史学の学際性の広さから、書誌家（bibliographer）に相応しいと指摘したのは、ジョンズ･ホプキンス大学初代学長ギルマンである。　 この洞察は確かで、今世紀の名館長に加えられそうなダーントン・ハーヴァード大学図書館長の最新著書が本書である。彼には日本でも多くの読者を得ている「猫の大虐殺」で描いた近世フランス史を中心にした碩学である。ギルマンの指摘は、不易な観点のようだ。そのヴェテランの経験を活かして、ここ数十年に書かれた書物に関する著書で、現代の読書が、印刷文化への影響力が大きいグーグルなどインターネット文化による革命的な諸事件をも視野に入れた著書。中でも知の公共性を重視した視点は、歴史家ならでは永く広い視野で議論され、欧米が古くから持つ文芸の共和国と公共性を論じるなど、古くて新しい問題に焦点を当てている。 　4千年の人類の歴史と最新のグーグルを並存するのは、彼の専門である歴史が語るとおりであり、ややアイロニカルに情報景観（Information Landscape）の一端を担っているグーグルに感謝の念を述べている。新しいメディアが登場するたびに革命的な観点が絶えず語られたが、古いメディアが完全に絶滅することはなかった、とでも言いたいのであろう。読みやすい文章で、碩学の筆は枯れている、というべきか、フランス語の影響か・・・明晰さを感じる英文である。　iPad版と較べると結構面白いです・・・