I came across a strangely disconnected article on the subject of e-books. I read the thing through several times and came out of it confused as to the author’s intent and confounded as to any useful content. If I had to give the article an overriding theme, I think it would have to be I am very uneasy about this whole e-books thing but I can’t really say why, so I’m looking around for something to criticize. The article made a game attempt at a unifying idea of the old-time palace of memory and the way one’s personal library could be thought of as just such a palace, but the analogy was forced and never quite jelled. Besides, the analogy would be just as applicable to any collection of information, as (to his credit) the author acknowledged.
But the unease about e-books persists amongst thinking peoples, including myself. I say that as an enthusiastic consumer of e-books; I have a Kindle, now dropped into disuse thanks to my lovely new iPad with its Kindle app, its much better screen, and its virtuoso flexibility—such is progress. I have been a denizen at Project Gutenberg practically from the beginning, and find to my delight that both the Kindle Store and Apple’s iBooks offer the Gutenberg titles (for free, of course.) I’m even becoming one of those horrid people who go to a bookstore, browse about, and while browsing check online via my iPhone to see if a book I want is available in digital form. I think e-books are just dandy.
But I’m also a guy who just loves to spend an afternoon in a bookstore, especially a big used bookstore like Green Apple or Moe’s. I see no contradiction here; I go to the theater sometimes, I watch TV sometimes, I watch downloaded digital video sometimes. I have lots and lots of physical books. I also have lots of the kinds of digital books that you actually buy and download, but I also know where to go online to access lots of stuff for free. As far as I can tell, physical books are here to stay for the long haul, but digital books are providing another resource—an easier one for most folks, certainly cheaper, in the long run probably better on the environment, and absolutely more convenient.
I look at my iPad and wonder what it would be like to carry all those books around as physical objects. I couldn’t do it. But my iPad is right there, small and light, nor will it become heavier as I add more books. And I am not limited to just my iPad; all of my Kindle books are backed up on Amazon’s servers, but I also download copies to my Kindle DX or my home computers or my laptop or even my iPhone. And the Gutenberg stuff and other such is freely accessible from anywhere. I don’t have the space to keep my physical library in multiple locations, just as accessible from my office at SFCM as here at home or anywhere else, but via digital, it’s not only possible but the natural state of things.
I recognize some of the dangers inherent in digital books; in fact, I would put fragility as No. 1 on the list. Not in the immediate sense, mind you, but given the evolution of digital formats and technology, I find it hard to imagine that an e-book of today will still be immediately readable 200 years from now. On the other hand, I find it equally hard to imagine that there won’t be some vastly more advanced technology in place by then. All libraries are charged with the storage and protection of their contents, whether those are digital or paper, and henny-penny portents of losing the collected written wisdom of the human race are just so much publish-or-perish gobbledegook. Just think how different things might have been had there been a backup copy or two of the Library of Alexandria somewhere. Even if the backup format were woefully obsolete, with time and skill it could be reverse-engineered and deciphered. Instead, it’s gone for good, beyond any hope of retrieval.
I suspect that lurking behind such articles as I mention above is a fundamental disconnect between the notion of digital versus physical. Somehow people tend to think of those digital books as specific things that reside in specific locations and take up specific space, just like physical books. But digital data, by definition, doesn’t reside so much as it persists, in multiple places simultaneously, isn’t a specific thing, and doesn’t take up specific spaces. A physical library must safeguard its physical objects—the books, pamphlets, letters, charts, maps, and the like, against destruction. Each copy of a physical book is a unique thing; that’s as true of a mass-produced pulp paperback as a hand-bound volume of Josquin chansons printed by Ottaviano Petrucci. Sometimes the physical actuality of the object is tremendously important—the parchment or vellum or paper, the ink, the binding materials, the glue, the leather or cardboard or wood or whatever surrounding it. But digital data has no such physical presence. Digital The Mill on the Floss is a long list of 1s and 0s; there is no one location for it in space. A file on a hard drive? In a sense, yes, but not really. Data on a hard drive is written all around the platters, not usually as a single sequence but hither and yon in scattered packets, however it best fits. Many hard drives are actually collections of drives that mirror and stripe the data around various drives so as to guard against loss. There are backups—quite possibly online and therefore quite possibly scattered all over the globe. There are entire site mirrors—de rigeur for corporate, governmental, or even very sensitive entities. Every time somebody downloads The Mill on the Floss from Project Gutenberg, another set of scattered packets, all capable of being reconstructed into a complete file, is brought into being and starts on its journey of reduplication and storage.
In short, there is no one single thing that is an original digital copy of The Mill on the Floss. Instead, there are packets of digits stored hither and yon, almost everywhere really, each one capable of being part of a re-assembly of a single file on a single computer, but no single one of those are any more the book than any other. There is no “there” there; it isn’t a thing or a location, but a Indra’s Net of nodes, packets, and pieces, everything reflecting everything else, everything in constant flux and movement, copied and reduplicated and moved and stored.
This accounts, by the way, for the still-gray legal issues of “buying” e-books—are they actually bought, or just licensed? What is it, precisely, that’s being “bought”?
Another issue is the implication of an always-on Internet connection, not just to one’s home computer, but the always-present reality of tablets, phones, laptops, and the like. At this point it makes very little difference whether the book I’m reading is stored somewhere in the digital innards of the device I’m using, or if it is being streamed from various places around the globe. The process of streaming makes at least a temporary copy of it on my device, but more to the point, location becomes downright irrelevant. What shards of a notion of “there” that remain are rendered meaningless by an always-on Internet connection. “There” becomes everywhere.
It has never been possible to pinpoint a physically valid location for, say, “Hamlet” or the Mozart G Minor Symphony. One could only pinpoint a specific copy, say perhaps a Penguin Classics paperback of Hamlet sitting at a particular place on a particular shelf in a particular library in a particular city. But digital abolishes even that fleeting physicality. And perhaps, in the long run, that’s what bugs people about e-books so much, the utter no-there-there-ness of it all, a fear of a world grown ever more tenuous and less spatially defined. Think of it as a kind of cultural agoraphobia, understandable to be sure, but a phobia just the same.