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April 5, 2010
The Cloud Library of Alexandria
As digital recordings displace physical ones, the risks expand.Think about books. Google's effort to scan every physical book ever published into its database has been compared to the creation of the great library of Alexandria. Should Google (or another organization) succeed in creating an easy-to-use, universally available store of digital books, we might well become dependent on that store - and take it for granted. We would stream books as we today stream videos. In time, we would find fewer and fewer reasons to maintain our own digital copies of books inside our devices; we would keep our e-books in the cloud. We would also find it increasingly hard to justify the cost of keeping physical copies of books, particularly old ones, on shelves, either in our homes or in libraries.
At that point, if we hadn't been very, very careful in how we developed and maintained our great cloud library, we would be left with few safeguards in the event that, for whatever foreseeable or unforeseeable reason, that library was compromised or ceased to function. We all know what happened to the library of Alexandria. -- Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Digital decay and the archival cloud
Posted by Vanderleun at April 5, 2010 12:55 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
We'll have to keep an eye on this. Some things to factor into our report:
Actual books should increase in value as their numbers diminish.
The ease of printing books has done nothing but increase, and the cost nothing but decrease, since the Library of Alexandria.
Posted by: Rick at April 5, 2010 1:21 PM
We're doomed for sure when the great grandkids ask, "What's a book?"
Posted by: Jewel at April 5, 2010 2:14 PM
Something Else To Worry About. Oy! Gevalt!
Posted by: Fat Man at April 5, 2010 7:00 PM
They'll have to pry my physical books from my cold dead hands.
Posted by: rickl at April 7, 2010 12:59 AM