Content transformation: from analog to digital – at what price?
One of the five themes of newly re-branded HP Labs is ‘content transformation’ – digitizing analog content from books and other printed matter into files stored on computers. Then transferring these digital files between devices (laptop, Kindle, iPAQ, iPod) and, finally, transforming the digital files (documents, photos) back to analog via digital printing technology.
Sounds marvelous. What’s not to like?
Well, the hubris of the high-tech industry is exposed by a telling comment in a book review in this weekend’s Financial Times. Lavinia Greenlaw, in reviewing The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, discusses the joy of “tumbling over authors” in libraries. The great libraries are, barring disaster such as fire (as famously happened at Alexandria), places where books endure for centuries. This has not been so with digitized content. Manguel notes:
In 1986, the BBC created a multimedia edition of the Domesday Book that is now unreadable as the technology with which it was made is obsolete. The actual book, almost 1,000 years old, is still perfectly legible.
Moreover, the Web, in contrast to physical libraries, delivers ephemera; 70% of its communications are destroyed after four months. “On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image.”
It’s been noted that the world will produce more content in the next five years than in all recorded history to date. Are we any the wiser for the flood of emails, instant messages, structured and unstructured data that this represents? Are we capable of absorbing the relevance of this digitized distraction?
The challenge for those who will provision the virtual libraries of the future, which could easily contain every book ever published for instant download and printing on demand, will be to ensure that the storage is as timeless as the shelves of the great libraries of history. No small feat in a world where uncertain supplies of energy power the vast datacenters where these digital records will be archived.
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Yes, one of the benefits of NOT being able to preserve things and instantly access them, is that the labor intensive process of retention and duplication tends to leave lesser works buried in the sands of time. Witness the enduring value of various scriptures, classic works of fiction and not fiction, and movies, for which the effort at preservation was made precisely because of that value. We are at risk of spending time and energy of various kinds preserving junk, just because we can.
Thanks for the article.
Gordon
By Gordon on 06.01.08 7:33 pm
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