Shirky (fwd)

[Clay Shirky]

I didn't realize when I replied to jschult at elmira.edu that I was also
CC:ing a mailing list. I attach my reply below.

-clay

------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Did Clay Shirky even listen to (or read) Billington's
> speech?!

Yes, and the Biz2.0 fact-checking department called the LoC to confirm
the quotes. 

> The first sentence is true, and does not contradict any of
> what Dr. Billington said.  Mr. Shirky seems to have totally,
> completely missed the Library of Congress' attempt to put
> online (and digitize) non-book items for which the web is
> now "uniformly better than the publishing products" that are
> otherwise available for such non-book items.  The point is
> the web is not now the best place to be distributing the
> books that the Library of Congress has, especially since
> they have many more non-book items which have no
> distribution system except for those that live within blocks
> of the LoC.

Yes, absolutely, and if Billington has stopped there, I would not have
bothered to write that essay. 

There are perfectly sensible reasons not to digtize books now: Limited
resources, a sense that .gov organizations should not be setting
copyright agenda, a sense that current digitization techniques are
potentially damagin, a sense that library science has not settled
digital archival issues, a belief that Moore's law will make
digitizing books in 10 years time cost a fraction of what it would
cost today.

Billington did not stop there, however. He also advanced
_philosophical_ reasons why books should not be digitized, once which
suggested that spreading text to people who lack physical access to
libraries is not, and should not be, a priority.

Here we disagree, violently. Hence the essay.

> My tirade delivered, I should explain that Professor Shirky
> has had the misfortune to hit one of my hot buttons, which
> is that this so-called Information Age is really a Marketing
> Age, where the development of the Net is not being driven by
> quality or even real human needs, but by profit or percieved
> human needs.  The library patron who gets a quick, slick
> answer from AskJeeves may initially be satisfied, and will
> think AJ is the bees' knees, but when they try to use that
> answer in a real situation where they need accurate,
> quality, not just information but understanding, they will
> find themselves shortchanged.

I am not arguing that the net is perfect. I am arguing that digitized
text gives more people access to the contents of books. I did not
advocate digitizing books and then discarding them, for example,
though a surprising number of people have read that into this essay.

And I don't understand your contempt for people who want access to
materials on the net. How can it be good to archive non-book materials
because it is a boon to humanity, but bad to digitize books because
the net is a cesspool of mediocrity?

>  Mr. Shirky, I challenge you to think about how the free market
> (free-for-all market?)  encourages mediocrity and caters to the
> lowest common denominator.

And I challenge you to explain to me how digitizing books does not
*raise* the tone of discourse on the net. Would this not in fact
mitigate against this very complaint of mediocrity?

>  One purpose of the Library of Congress is to preserve and make
> available information and history that the "market" would just as
> soon forget; they are not in the business of competing with
> NetLibrary or eBooks.

Nor should they be: they are a non-profit. But surely one of the goals
of a state-supported library should be increased access for the
populace. On the net, more people can access ideas, and do it more
cheaply and with less regard to geographic barriers. How can this be
bad?

-clay

-- 
Clay Shirky                 |    shirky.com - Essays on the Internet:
http://www.shirky.com/      |        Culture, Economics, Globalization