By Stuart Gordon
I love to read. I love books. But for the past six months the only so-called book I have touched is my Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader. Similarly, we find that the information from books available in the library is also available on the Internet. I can’t help but wonder if books are outdated. If so, does our library need the books it has?
I give the Ekstrom Library credit: They have done a wonderful job in keeping up with the times. As anyone who’s ever been in the library knows, the first floor is littered with computers. Furthermore, they have everything from digital cameras to Kindles for rent. And, of course, they have a lot of books.
However, it seems to me that everything a book can do a computer can do better. With a computer, you can access digital material from virtually anywhere in the world. Then you can digitally search through a selected work and find useful information. Also, an unlimited number of people can access a certain work simultaneously. Digital works are also less likely to be lost and impossible to be stolen when they belong to the public domain. Costs go down as well, since no material has to be printed. Rare and hard to find works become accessible to all.
On the other hand, this might be where the case for books is strongest. Some things aren’t about what they convey, so much as what they are or what they represent. A picture of almost any famous painting can be found online, but the “Mona Lisa” is still worth seeing.
So, for cases of unique and rare pieces, the originals may hold some value that simply cannot be reproduced, digitally or otherwise. But most books of the past century – give or take a few decades – are mass-produced anyways. I see no reason not to accept them in a digitally mass-produced format.
A growing number of people are beginning to think that books are outdated. Google seems to be a faster and easier source of information, and that can be problematic.
“I’ve assigned specific readings and students have come back to me and said, ‘I can’t find it anywhere’… without looking in books,” said Guy Dove, an assistant professor of philosophy. “The student mentality sometimes seems to be, ‘If it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.’ And that’s simply not true.”
It is a valid point that books go back further than the Internet and, subsequently, digital conversion has a great deal of catching up to do. Furthermore, it is wrong to dismiss the existence of a certain topic just because Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on it. However, old material is constantly being digitally converted. And I would claim that practically every new piece of work is already in a digital format, though not necessarily one available to the public.
With the exception of specific, rare or hard to find books, it seems that the Internet holds all the advantages for the average, modern-day student. I don’t want to say that a library shouldn’t have books. I just think that someday soon they will not.
