Charlie Rose

REMant  01/12/2010 12:57 PM Report

Digitization is from one point of view a radical decentralization, but from another a radical centralization. It ought tho to make the back lists more available. What is disappearing is the middlemen, aristocracy or subsidiary institutions, that virtue which is supported by insularity, and with that I think must come an increased emphasis on fads, because they are more profitable and margins will be slimmer so profitability more important, alone punctuating a bleak uniformity, like Stephen Leacock's word of the day. None of this, however, is new, and has been complained of at regular intervals since the dawn of the "industrial age," by the arts and craft movement and before that William Cobbett, the Luddites, Thoreau, the Shakers, and the Levellers, etc. Google has indeed made a mess of their book copying, but not to worry, because The Internet Archive has done the job much better and is a more than adequate competitor, except that unlike Google's set-up, the books cannot be searched externally. Indeed I took The PBS News Hour to task for misrepresenting this not long ago. One of these days it will be discovered that, like Microsoft, Google is more a speculative vehicle than one that goes anywhere (I hope).