Am I the Last to See This?

[ojai22]

From the Arts page of THE WEEK Nov. 28 edition:


THE NEW AMAZON: Will books ever be the same?

Amazon.com recently introduced an innovation in human record keeping as profound as the first cave paintings, said Steven Levy in Newsweek. The breakthrough wasn't threated as October's biggest news story, but when the online superstore unveiled its new "Search Inside the Book" service, it was "a lightning bolt from the future," a harbinger of the day when all recorded knowledge is "astonishingly accessible" to anyone withing walking distance of an Internet hookup. What Amazon has done is scan the pages of 120,000books, making every word or phrase retrievable with a single click of a mouse. "Some literally broke down in tears as they punched in" their first queries and realized that research tasks "that had once taken months to complete could now be dispatched in an evening."

"Predictions abot the future of books have been swirling in the air ever since," said Lisa Guernsey in The New Your Times. When readers can type in a phrase and see virtually every page it appears on, "will people stop buying books," or will they buy more? Writers of travel guides and recipe books are particularly fearful of a "Napster situation," said Chris Taylor in Time, but Amazon obviously expects the service to boost its own sales. My guess is the publishing industry will probably benefit as well. Today's teenagers tend "to shun any information that isn't delivered fresh and piping hot" to their computer screens, so book sales have been hurt. Beginning now, "the Google generation might get a lot more interested in wood pulp."

Amazon's new archive is "far from complete," said Gary Wolf in Wired. Its 120,000 titles are equivalent to the holdings of a large bookstore--not the Library of Congress. But it's destined to grow, and it has already shifted power in the book business "away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and toward the people" who offer "information about where the material can be found." That too puts us all closer to realizing the centuries-old dream of "a universal library."