The New Yorker on the Future of Reading

[drago]

Future Reading
Digitization and its discontents.
by Anthony Grafton

The New Yorker on the Future of Reading

"For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come. At the New York Public Library, the staff loves electronic media. The library has made hundreds of thousands of images from its collections accessible on the Web, but it has done so in the knowledge that its collection comprises fifty-three million items."

[Alexander Turcic]

I find this quote intriguing:

As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.”