Internet Librarian
 By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Associate dean, Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
April 2007
W(h)ither Print?
A coda for the codex
I don’t recall what I wrote in my admissions essay for library school, some (ulp!) 25 years ago, which is probably just as well. I doubt it was of the “I love books” variety—although of course I do and always have, including the six stacked by the bed, largely recommended by friends (thanks Steven!). We LIS administrators do still get a few application statements from people who seem to think librarianship entails reading quietly all day, interrupted only to recommend Worthy Literature and Good Books to eager inquirers. Nice work if you can get it.
The “book” in its current codex form is, obviously, still with us and, recent obituaries notwithstanding, seems to be going strong. And yet. . . .
Mid-February brought an announcement of a new newspaper covering the Pacific Northwest, founded by the editor of Seattle’s major alternative weekly. Nothing radical there, except that Crosscut will be exclusively web-based, incorporating what the February 14 Seattle Times called “a mix of original journalism, blogs, material derived from the mainstream media and other sources, and forums and other interactive features.”
On the other end of the durability scale came the item from Stockholm in January that the world’s oldest newspaper, the Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, founded in 1645 (by Queen Christina, no less), has, in a seemingly desperate attempt at survival and relevance, abandoned its print format to be exclusively digital.
Major libraries seem to be joining the Google Book Search bandwagon with increasing rapidity and eagerness. The original Google Five have been joined in a steady drumbeat by the likes of Princeton and the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin, and Virginia. The Open Content Alliance has signed up Boston Public, the Smithsonian, the European Archive, and the National Library of Australia. Windows Live has a books tool as well, though I had a heck of a time finding it, and I swear to you it had no help button.
Netflix, in naked recognition that its business model is of a purely transitory nature, is beginning a rollout of a view-on-demand service for computers this year. Downloadable audiobooks, MP3s, YouTube, Wikipedia; the litany is by now familiar. If you’re being honest with yourself and listen to that small but insistent voice in the back of your brain, you know something nontrivial is afoot.
Transition ahead
I think we are entering an extended period of transition—likely considerably shorter than the several centuries it took for the codex to totally replace the scroll as the format for the “book”—in which a number of forms will arrive, compete, overlay, vanish, and thrive, probably in very quick succession.
If you are reading this in print or, appropriately, on the Web in 2007, then this transition will likely not be completed during your lifetime; I can’t imagine the codex book evaporating that quickly, especially for popular fiction and nonfiction, children’s books, and so on. But newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, film? (Future readers can let me know what really happens by ansible.)
One more nonprediction: As more works originate digitally and remain that way, I’d guess that old organizational and collective structures and frameworks (vocabularies, genres, formats) will fade for a time. How do you catalog a blog? Index a live webcam feed? Then new ones will re-emerge, as we and our successors figure out ways to make order in such a dynamic world.
Are we at the beginning of the end of print and other analog media? (Hello, recording industry? Motion pictures?) It’s difficult to count out an information object that’s been around for nearly 1,900 years, so I wouldn’t go quite that far; but perhaps we are instead, to paraphrase Churchill, at the end of the beginning of digital media as the preeminent and predominant format for enduring human communication . . . but that’s another story.
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