I wrote a paper for the First International Conference on the Future of the Book in 2003. It was published in some of the conference apocrypha, and I used to have a link to a copy online, but it appears to be one. If I can dig up the proof later, I will repost it.
In that paper, I vigorously defended the need to ensure total portability and maintainability of a digital library. Countless of times over the course of history thought has been pooled by the destruction of a single tome which contained unique thought of the time. When the physical book was gone, the thought was erased, or obscured until rediscovered. Recent work on some of Archimedes’ texts have shown that the ancient Greeks (or at least one of them) knew a whole lot more than we give them credit for. Digital libraries need to have universal form and function, so they can be integrated into a greater collective of knowledge.
My paper argued that the meat of the book, the words, could be captured electronically and flawlessly. This process would preempt the happenstantial destruction of a work, and allow for simple and fast replication and dissemination. Further, with all works eventually becoming digital, cross referencing, indexing, and knowledge slicing would become streamlined to the point where you literally could find the connections between anything.
In Matthew Woodring Stover’s Heroes Die, we are given a fantastic view of what things may become (albeit with an incredible fantastic twist). The idea of purely electronic documents allows for the control of the text, and the ideas behind it. Books are tactile things, and hard to edit seamlessly. Electronic documents are susceptible to revisions without it ever being obvious to the reader, and in certain scenarios, even real time. The use of editions in large-scale publications address this somewhat in terms of being able to track changes across the history of a body of work in paper, but no such device exists for electronic documents in eprint.
The father of the protagonist in the book points out that if you have a printed copy of a book, nobody can twist or change the knowledge in that book without you knowing it. It is a particularly poignant point in the face of the big-brother information control environment, but one which I ultimately threw by the wayside as alarmist claptrap. After all, couldn’t people have been doing such things for years with conventional printing? From what I know about the bookmaking industry, enough things get into works gone to press that are _not_ supposed to be there that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone wanted to play big brother with a white pen, they could do so with relative ease. Perhaps naively, I assume that there will be no one single controlling interest overseeing the entire digital library process. That was why I was so adamant about open standards, so everyone is doing everything the same way, despite the fact that it was not all being done by the same people.
Many of the detracting arguments against eprint are aesthetic. Typeset, font, paper’s tactile value and color. The power of good binding and strong cover (not to mention cover art). All these things, to me, are secondary to the actual work – the words which capture the writer’s intent and pass them on to the reader. Some people can’t get past the actual process of flipping pages and holding a sheaf of paper. To them, I usually say, get over it.
Today was the first time, however, that something occurred to me which was a spot-on argument against eprint.
Steganography.
Not the new fangled hard core digital pixel manipulation encoding we all know and love thanks to media mongers after 9/11. I’m talking about the old school stuff. The stuff of the 14th and 15th century, which _I_ know and love.
All old textual stegnographic works that I have ever done any work on are all contextually based. That means that font type and placement, graphic placement and where that graphic related to the page count, chapter breaks etc, as well as the spacing of columns and tabs were absolutely integral to the ability to decode ANYTHING. Granted, some works (like Trithemius’ stuff, and Wolfgang Heidel’s writings) can be brute forced mathematically if you have the sequences and apply the correct pattern.
But, for true textual steganography, there is too much contextual nuance to be captured digitally, unless you do image scans. Image scans are something I am totally against, because of quality control issues, storage size, and the inability to tag them in a reliable manner with minimal human interaction (and therefore chance of error).
What this has made me realize is that most books are soulless things. They are little more than sentences and paragraphs of sinew and meat slapped over a skeletons of chapters and sections. However, in certain cases, the actual artifice of the book gives a physical work a soul. This is particularly the case in pre-printing press works, but there are clear exceptions to that generalization.
When the soul of such a book is to encapsulate a hidden meaning or message, the translation to electronic media in an elegant format seems too daunting a task to contemplate. Combined with the actual loss of the artifact itself as the de-facto source of experience (see the Archimides link above), I am now beginning to wonder if perhaps I need to revise my outlook on the significance of implementing true digital collections.
All this on less than three hours sleep! What have you done with your morning?