The rise of e-books not only poses problems for publishers, it also asks to rethink the position or function of the library. Bexar County’s (Texas) Judge Nelson Wolff envisioned BiblioTech, the first public digital library. A modern library that will ‘store’ just e-books, not physical books.
“Through BiblioTech, residents of Bexar County will be able to access approximately 10,000 current titles through e-readers that they can check out to take home or read on the premises. Residents will also be able to use their own e-readers or tablets to access the collection.” 1
Conceptual renderings of Bexar County’s digital-only BilblioTech library Bexar County Commissioners Court
If we have to believe the image above, this modern library will look a lot like Apple stores. It will be filled with aisles of computers and gadgets instead of physical books. It is great that BiblioTech tries to bring these services to people who do not necessarily have access to technologies to read e-books. However, when a library is not limited by the amount of books it can physically store, or exchange between several nearby libraries, then why is there still a limit of 10.000 current titles? How modern is this concept of a library?
When moving from physical books to e-books there is no real limitation to the amount of books you can offer to the public. Current costumer hard drives of one terabyte allow you to store 500,000,000 pages of reading. More than you can read in a lifetime. And for instance P2P systems like Kazaa or Limewire allow you to access and share these files through the Internet. Moreover, e-books can be copied endlessly. You don’t need to return your copy to the library so someone else can borrow it as well. You can keep your ‘personal’ copy and even add notes and annotations, and in this manner create your personal library.
The limitation of 10.000 books thus seems to be build around proprietary regimes and copyright laws that limit the exchange of knowledge instead of allowing the free flow of easily copied, shared and stored e-books. From this perspective the library is seen as a warehouse that stocks information and ideas, managing the rights to lent these books to you. Essentially it limits the amount of information you can access instead of opening it up. Instead of rethinking the possibilities of a digital library, BiblioTech copies the tactics of the libraries we already know – it seems you even have to return the e-books you ‘lent’.
However, a more intriguing concept that helps to rethink the function of the library, and look beyond these principles of copyright, is the ‘personal portable library’ conceptualized by Henry Warwick. He will publish the essay ‘Sharing is Caring’ within the network notebooks series of the Institute of Network Cultures about this topic shortly.
His concept builds on the fact that it is now more easy than ever to copy and share e-books, or more specifically to share complete libraries stored on one single hard drive neatly managed and preferable with a directory to help retrieve the books. He builds on older notions of the library and moves away from the idea of the library as warehouse. As he explains the older libraries were copy-making centers, copying every clay tablet or papyrus roll they could gather. This changed when the printing press mechanized the process of copying books.
“With this mechanisation came several changes to the purpose and meaning of the library. As a printing press was an expensive piece of gear, there was a high investment cost in printing books. The result was the development of copyright laws to protect the interests of capital and its investment in production. Libraries ceased to be centres of copying and became warehouses of information.” 2
Creating a digital library as yet another place to gate keep our access to copyrighted material is in a sense very modern, but e-books allow us to exploit the original role of libraries as copy-centres as explained by Warnick. Instead of copying one book per month we can copy whole libraries in an hour or less. So why go to an all digital library if you can only read 10.000 books?