Robert Darnton, director of the University Library at Harvard, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books that no matter how successful the Google book project becomes - no matter how many libraries co-operate and no matter how many billions of pages are ultimately archived online - physical libraries full of paper books will become "more important than ever."
His argument rests on eight points:
(1) The full holdings of the world's libraries can never be completely digitized, which may lead to the important non-digitized books being ignored;
(2) Google has not ventured into libraries' special collections, where the rarest books are found;
(3) arguments over copyright will continue to be a problem;
(4) obsolescence is built into electronic media, and Google is a company that, like any other, may suffer economic reverses;
(5) Google will make mistakes, and the visual reproduction of actual pages will never be perfect;
(6) electronic media become degraded over time - nothing guarantees preservation like ink on paper;
(7) Google does not employ bibliographers to rank the importance of various editions, so is of little help to researchers; and
(8) a book's physical aspects, its stains, its smells, its marginalia, "provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system."
Via GlobeAndMail