Darnton is a little bit who I want to be when I grow up. Current director of the Harvard University Library, he spent his career teaching European history, studying books and book culture of the French Enlightenment, and running from one library trusteeship to the next. He also has been at the leading edge of electronic book publishing and the application of academic standards thereto while pioneering research in the study of the book. Yeah.
Despite all of this time spend in the thick of academia, however, he also is a surprisingly accessible writer. A Case for Books is a collection of essays concerning the future of print, the current state of libraries and electronic publishing, and love of the historical and physical object of the book. Some of the essays focus primarily on the state of things from the academic perspective--i.e. scholars' need for continued acquisitions of physical books, the difficulty of scholarly publishing and the major causes of those difficulties. Others, however, concern themselves more broadly with the problem with making information available to the widest public possible, doing so in a responsible fashion, and how to make digital copies viable in a long-term capacity. The final section dwells on the sentiments of an inveterate book-lover, and is perhaps the most immediately accessible for those looking to find lively and informative writing on the object of the book itself.
However, some of the more technical and current-issue essays were more engaging than I anticipated. One issue that I found especially surprising was the controversy surrounding libraries' subscriptions to academic journals. Apparently costs of such journals has been spiraling out of control in the last few decades, forcing libraries to devote more and more of their budgets to maintaining these subscriptions rather than to new book acquisitions--as much as 50% of the budget, in some cases. Scholars and students have little notion of these financial burdens because they can access these publications for free--at the cost of thousands of dollars per journal to the libraries--and consider this access to be vital to remaining abreast of developments in their field. Needless to say, this puts libraries in an awkward position. University libraries may seem more obviously the center of this kind of crisis, but Darnton also points out the issue of public access--if costs are prohibitively expensive, then non-scholars simply may not have access to specialized research, or public libraries will have if anything greater financial woes.
Did you have any idea that this was going on? I certainly did not. Darnton is probably happy, however, at recent developments in California: the state's university librarians and scholars have agreed to stand up to a recent inflation in an influential journal's subscription cost and, hopefully, will have enough clout to make a point. The story can be read here.
Another major worry of Darnton's is that we may be jumping the gun on seeing digitization as a viable replacement for physical books. At first I thought that this part might be a little hysterical, but then again, I saw a recent discussion in the New York Times titled "Do School Libraries Need Books?" Current high schoolers think that using actual books for research is retrograde. Hm. Although we tend to believe that basically any information can now be found online, the truth is that digitization simply hasn't and can't both catch up and keep up with all that has been published to date. Furthermore, technology is notorious for changing faster than institutions can keep up with it, as outdated computers, printers, and televisions in any number of schools can attest. We already know that digital information can deteriorate and that the information storage systems of fifteen years ago are basically archaic today; what makes us think that present digitization is really less maintenance and more lasting than books? This is not to say that digital projects should be abandoned, but rather that we should think first before discarding digitized books (which has happened in enormous quantities already). If anything, digitization efforts should be supported as a means of making more information available to more people--but not to the exclusion of good old paper-and-ink books.
These are simplified versions of the issues that arise in The Case for Books, but they seem very timely and worth consideration for any aspiring scholar, an enthusiast for libraries, or for those who are simply unsure about whether they want all reading material to go in the direction of the Kindle. The book may be, in parts, a little dense for casual reading, but Darnton is nevertheless an engaging writer whose topical chapters are certainly worth a glance if you have any sort of concern about publishing and information access in the coming years.
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