Sun, Mar 23, 2008 Permanent link"all the world’s books gathered in the digital domain will take up no more than 26 terabyes of disc space"
Where is this figure from? It's way too low. The Library of Congress is estimated at 20TB and that's just the books stored as raw text. To fairly say that a book is stored digitally it should at least retain its layout, typesetting, images etc.
The point is kind of moot of course seeing as no matter how much disc space it will actually take we will be able to produce it at some point in the future with the same ease as 26TB now.
I certainly hope that the effort will be made at some stage to preserve as many books as possible in a digital format as true to the original as possible from which hybrid, interactive forms can then be derived. It would be a shame if their content was lost, as between the musty, institutionalized ideas I'm sure there are some that are worth dusting off and airing out again.
Maybe they'll just live on in the lore of the homeless...
Sun, Mar 23, 2008 Permanent linkMy information comes from the source mentioned below (see SpaceCollective's Grand Narrative):
I interviewed Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive, which he envisions as the digital equivalent of the fabled library of Alexandria (...) According to Kahle there are roughly 26 million books in the library of congress, the largest print library in the world. This may seem like a lot of books, but in the digital age it doesn’t represent that many data. On the web, for example, an equivalent amount of information as is printed in that amount of books is posted online every two months.
When you consider that at the moment it takes one person a year to scan 3000 books, it means that all 26 million titles can be scanned by the population of Detroit in the course of one long weekend. In terms of computer storage the entire content of a book on average takes up only one megabyte. Twenty six million megabytes translates into 26 terabytes, which can be stored in a box that comfortably fits on one small shelf.
Even if Brewster was off by a few million, the point is that in computer terms this order of data can be considered minimal, and - issues of preservation aside - it is fair to assume that the digital liberation of all this content is near.
Sun, Mar 23, 2008 Permanent linkAh ok, I was going off this breakdown.
The 20TB for the LoC is widely quoted, not sure where it originated.
Mon, Mar 24, 2008 Permanent linkI remember reading somewhere that Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, was considering licensing out the entire encyclopedia to robot designers. Eventually he hoped that all ranges of domestic robots would have built within them the knowledge of Wikipedia.
If all books that have reached their copyright age could also be included in that compendium then it would be quite easy for anyone who could afford a home robot to have access to the majority of human knowledge. Here's to asking your vacuum cleaner to read you Edwin Abbot's Flatland, or have your fridge dictate the figure of Pi to 10,000 decimal places.
(I think the Jimmy Wales/robot article was this one. There is also an interesting Q & A with him here.)
Mon, Mar 24, 2008 Permanent linkDownloading Wikipedia into robots may turn out to be less absurd than it sounds. In the Seattle library is a special department for the handicapped where methods are explored to make books accessible for deaf people by converting regular letters into Braille dots which are instantly embossed on printing paper. A librarian also pointed proudly at a Kurzweil reading machine developed in 1976, which turns written words into synthesized speech by way of a flatbed scanner. It reminded me how Ray Kurzweil built exceptional keyboard synthesizers accurately reproducing the sounds of acoustic instruments as early as 1983. From there he went on to create artificially intelligent software for his “Cybernetic Poet” which helps users write poetry and song lyrics, to be followed by his Cyber Artist and pattern recognition software that served as a stock market prognosticator. All this eventually led to his embrace of the Singularity as the defining moment when machines are supposed to surpass human intelligence. Even though I have also been very influenced by the audio (and visual) sampling metaphor as an introduction into our current ways of recombinant information processing, I’m personally more interested in the meeting point where the artificial and the organic intersect while reflecting on each other. As opposed to Kurzweil’s technocratic approach which happens to be rather cold and devoid of sensuality, I love robots the way the Japanese do, mocking our humanity in an endearing way. I love the early versions of synthesizers that allowed musicians to blow into a hose connected to their keyboards to introduce human breath into their impersonal saxophone samples. I'm a fan of the techno-timbre of Daft Punk’s Vocoder voices, and the virtual/physical simulations of the Wii interface. I enjoy putting my scanned signature on computer-generated documents, and am astonished every time a computer animator dials in the artificial gravity that rules the behavior of a CG animated character. When we still watched films on VHS, my thumb developed a peculiar reflex trying in vain to push the fast forward button of an imaginary remote to skip boring scenes of the movie unspooling in the theater's projection room. As a result of the relentless linearity of the experience I increasingly turned away from the cinema, and for similar reasons I am now reading far less books than I used to because I cannot search their printed pages. But perhaps we can have it all. In the past there have been various unique contraptions that aspired to be reading machines, and Philips has made a lot of headway with the development of its electronic paper. Also, at some point there will undoubtedly be interfaces that may allow our eyes to relate to visual information as intimately as the auditory input of our earphones. The truth is that at this point I couldn’t possibly sustain my intellectual curiosity without books, but I will never again be the captive reader I once was. So as far as I’m concerned I would try an intellectually savvy robot anytime. I’m sure it’ll be a lot more fun to engage with an educated robot than listening to books on my iPod in the car, especially since, as an added benefit, my man-made passenger will give me access to the carpool lane.
It is interesting to attend to the book in and of itself, but as my original article alluded to and yours continues to consider, although the relationship between books and consciousness has brought us to this priveleged point in the history of self-knowledge, it will be the relationship between consciousness and the internet which which take us onto the next stage.
Novels emerged in union with a new way of looking at ourselves - a relationship we were only capable of acknowledging in retrospect. Yet although the internet is still in its primordial stages I believe it is possible to contemplate the emerging effect it is having on our idea of identity. In an era when no iota of information is allowed to exist unconnected to any other (e.g. hypertext, search engines, wikipedia), and communication is an activity which occurs regardless of whether humans are taking part in it (e.g. a box popping up on my screen to tell me that my friend has just come online), there can be no such thing as:
...anymore.
On top of this, and in reflection of many of the other wonderful articles that have become entombed in The Total Library so far, I think it is time to start defining the difference between books as archaeological objects composed of paper, books as tomes of knowledge and books simply as entities that we read (in whatever form they happen to take). At present 26 terabyte hard-drives are not capable of attaining the multiplicity of forms that make paper books so easy to have visceral, intellectual and long lasting relationships with. Though as the internet evolves new ways for us to interact and merge with our data, this distinction is bound to become less obvious.
I personally can't wait to see the outcome.