Digital Comic Museum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Yoc on August 01, 2011, 09:31:30 AM
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Here's an interesting topic that's worth a read.
http://news.yahoo.com/internet-archivist-seeks-1-every-book-written-183621648.html
Thanks to loftypilot for pointing it out.
-Yoc
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I applaud the insane goal of the project and will probably try to help out. And certainly love my books for the reasons he suggests, but I disagree with the thesis that "there's always a role for books." It's like saying that there's always a role for album art (while people buy MP3s) or floppy disks.
They can be a kind of art that's impossible with more modern media, and the medium may have forced certain artistic decisions, but that's not necessarily a relevant role, and it ignores the fact that the majority of books are merely carriers for the content. Like, I own a mass-market paperback of "The Tempest." I doubt that anybody is more attached to that artifact than they are to the file (with pretty much the same text) hosted by Project Gutenberg.
But as I said, it's a great project. If nothing else, it'll be a good source to scan from as copyrights expire and an interesting kind of museum.
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I should also mention this, now that I've watched it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html
It's Kahle talking about the Internet Archive's projects, to give a sense of the scope involved. Most interesting is something that has been kicked around here, I believe: Don't farm out your scanning to people who don't care about the content, even if it sounds cheaper.