Quote:
Originally Posted by markbot
You can also get free books at the the library....but of course they aren't actually free since they are supported with charity and public funds. thus u pay for it via taxes. Phyiscal libraries are obsolete in a digital age. We should have digital libraries.
Buy Kindle!!! Lower Taxes!!!
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The place I mentioned lets you have the books forever for free. No cost, not supported by taxes.
And for anther point, I do work at a Library and it is not obsolete. There are limitations to digitization that I more than many am aware of.
One - not everything is available digitally and there are things that never will be. There are specialty and small press and authors (i.e., J.K. Rowling) who will never provide online access.
Two - even where things are digitized, not all have secure archives. There are a couple of services, for example Portico, which have archives which are opened in the event a publisher goes out of business. A book is it's own archive. Many libraries have staff who are knowledgeable in preserving books. No Library has the resources to store or maintain digital archives of their entire collections.
Three - digitization is not equal to print in all cases. We have art journals that are available online which just do not match those available in print. The limits of the common computer monitor are just unable to display the art in full resolution. In addition broadband is still inadequate in many cases to provide an experience equal to phyiscal media. For instance we recently purchased a set of instructional books including some for media applications like Final Cut pro. The physical book included a DVD with examples for editing. When using the online version, one must download the examples. Instead of being able to work directly from the DVD, one must take hours, probably more than half a day to download all the examples. Unfortunately administrators have decided to get rid of all of our physical copies of these books.
Also there are platforms which provide access to online versions of journals which are very slow to load. I mean minutes just to get to a list of current and archived copies.
Many digitized books and journals were not digitized using OCR, and therefore are not searchable.
Four - Libraries have evolved with the times and according to surveys are considered one of the most necessary components of Colleges and Universities - even in the age of digitization. Please go to Duke University's new Library and tell me that it is obsolete.
Five - there are already considerable digital libraries and they are part of, not replacing physical libraries.
Six - digital versions are not always cheaper than their print counterparts.
Seven- there is still a lag in providing metadata for digital resources and there is not a good universal standard for doing so.
Eight - E-readers are here to stay, I hope. I see them as another way to read content, not as a replacement for every book. Though my Library is not using them, many Libraries do lend content for e-readers.
Nine- Libraries are not simply a collection of books. If you think so, you simply mistaken. They are gathering places, places to hear Authors reading books and taking questions, to see films not generally available, places to study, to take classes, to learn to research, to see actual collections of physical items like manuscripts.
Ten- online versions have glitches occasionally. I have yet to hear anybody say "this book is not working", but I hear the same about online resources all the time, usually when somebody needs the information at a critical moment in their research or paper preparation.
I have more but I am exhausted...