Digital-Only Books Are Cultural Suicide

I suppose many people would read that headline and consider it heresy. Others probably don’t see a connection between e-books and the survival of a culture.

So, bear with me a bit. This is something that’s been bugging me for years now.

First, don’t accuse me of being a Luddite. I have a degree in electrical engineering (one course shy of a minor in computer science). I was an Air Force pilot. I worked for 20 years as an engineer on the latest and greatest defense programs (B-2 bomber, F-16 and F-22 fighters). I’ve owned and used personal computers since the days when you had to use a cassette tape player for data storage and an old B&W TV for a monitor. I’ve programmed computers in languages used on mainframe and personal computers (Fortran, Algol, Cobol, Basic, PL1, etc.). My computer programs in college were done using huge decks of punched cards created on manual keypunch machines.

I have been using the Internet since the days when you put your telephone handset in a cradle (and 300 baud was awesome bandwidth) and everything was text-only.

I have jumped on just about every technology bandwagon that’s come along. I love technology and everything it has done, and continues to do, for us.

Second, I’ve been reading and purchasing e-books since I first found somebody offering downloadable TXT-format files. I think e-books are great as alternative formats, and some books can be digital-only without any serious long-term effects.

But I think society is making a serious mistake when it accepts the idea that digital-only books and/or web-based books are a good idea in general. Likewise, when we accept the idea that collaborative literature is better than a lone writer cranking out words that we must read the way that writer intended them to be read without editorial input from the readers.

There is a notion that has been proselytized far and wide for years now — a notion that now permeates our schools — that everything done by a team is better than if accomplished by an individual. Creativity, they insist, is the result of drawing on a diverse pool of inputs. It takes a village, so the unspoken mantra goes, to create truly great ideas.

Folks, that is the mindset that produced communism — the individual must be subservient to the group.

Would Shakespeare’s plays have been better if a team had produced them? Would Mark Twain’s insights been more on-target and meaningful if he’d let his potential readers edit it in some data cloud? Would you even be able to recognize the voices of the great writers and thinkers, who’ve contributed so much to the evolution of society (for good and ill)?

That’s not meant to denigrate teamwork, which is important in many ways. But real creativity almost always stems from the genius of an individual who sees things differently than the larger group…or society.

All of which, perhaps in a roundabout way, brings me to my main concern with the explosive growth of  (and even grander expectations for) e-books and the “data cloud.”

Question: Are e-books more permanent than printed books?

Answer: Are you kidding? I have tapes and disks, squirreled away in a box, with data on them, and the data on them that can’t be accessed by any PC in general use. I suppose if I searched long enough, I could find somebody with an archaic machine that could retrieve the data, but I would also need to find some equally archaic software to interpret much of it. I keep one old, slow PC around primarily because it still has a functional 3.5″ disk drive. But I have no machine that can read the old 5.25″ single-sided, 180kb floppies I still own, mostly created in the original version of the TRS-DOS operating system.

Ah, you say, but somebody somewhere can read them. Maybe. Today. What about tomorrow? Or ten years from now?

No problem, you might say, Google is ready to take all of today’s digital content and upload it to their digital cloud where it can be accessed anywhere on any platform or OS.

But wait…

Let’s just suppose that a major solar flare and accompanying mass ejection slams into Earth next year. There’s a real possibility, maybe even a high probability, that it could disrupt electrical grids worldwide (maybe for years) and even wipe out data residing in data storage systems. Or maybe a batch of Islamofascists detonate a handful of purloined nukes in key locations…the resulting EMP might accomplish almost as much.

I’m sure the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians thought their civilizations and all their records would last forever. And the Greeks. Likewise the Romans. Even the “sun never sets on the” British Empire was once thought invincible.

What we know of those cultures and societies stems from data and records put in a solid, physical format. Some of it was lost to the effects of time and the elements, of course. Some of it took researchers a long time to decipher and understand. What if the ancient Egyptians had committed everything to 2.36cm semi-rigid diskettes written in long-forgotten software code using who-knows-what operating system? How much would have survived? How long would it have taken to determine what it was, how to read it, and what it all meant?

It probably wouldn’t matter much if 90% of the books being written today were lost forever to posterity or a future civilization trying to recover from the ashes of the past. But which 10% is worth trying to preserve? Which books will make a difference to an unknown, and unknowable, Earth society a century or a millennium from now?

If those 10% are the ones somebody committed to archival paper and stashed away in a suitable storage box, our culture just might make a difference to those future Earth citizens trying to reinvent the critical things.

But what if the only things to survive are Entertainment Weekly or the collection of Harlequin romance novels?

And, if Google creates their goal of a massive data cloud of all books and knowledge…what if some megalomaniac decides to take it over and start rewriting and changing the data in it? Orwell may have been truly prescient with his vision of history books being rewritten to support the latest versions of “truth” while all the previous editions are destroyed. That is far easier to do when all data is digital…particularly if it exists only in a cloud somewhere.

Google may not be the one to try to rewrite what’s been created…but if history is any indication, somebody will try to do so. And they might succeed.

Of course, we have people rewriting history all the time. Unfortunately for them, we still have copies of the older texts in personal, academic, and public libraries. They can never completely eradicate what was already committed to printed form.

I’m sure some would argue that the same can said for digital data — it will exist on somebody’s laptop somewhere. But more and more companies, and individuals, are succumbing to the lure of keeping that data only in the cloud (by using Google’s cloud computing apps).

And there’s still that nasty solar flare. It’s not really a matter of if…only a matter of when and just how serious.

Societies and cultures have risen and fallen over the eons. Ours will be no different.

The question is — what will remain as our cultural legacy? Only digital bits that can no longer be accessed or interpreted (or, perhaps, even recognized)?

Yup, digital-only is a recipe for cultural and literary suicide.

Food for Thought

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting

The e-book, the e-reader, and the future of reading

Well, that’s a sufficiently long and rambling post for today. I’m still pondering a post about whether the proliferation of e-books will unalterably affect the ability of our descendants to think critically.  Don’t laugh. Young brains are being rewired today in ways we can only guess.

Oh…and I hope you had a Merry Christmas and are about to have a truly Happy and Prosperous New Year!