Sinners Repent! The End is Nigh!

After hearing about e-Readers, I've been trying to decide how badly I want one. The reading habits that spurred me towards librarianship in high school gradually evaporated as I began to turn towards graphic novels in 2004, and after four and half years of associating reading with school work and carrying my customary hatred of schoolwork over into my life, I'm criminally underread.

The biggest obstacle to returning to the literate fold is getting books. My apartment is tiny and I have almost no room for book storage. So getting an e-reader seems like a good idea. The logical next step, right? On the other hand, it's difficult to read things like the comic above and not find yourself smirking meaningfully. There is an assumed holiness about the codex, the book, that makes replacing it feel strange. It doesn't help that as an owner of books there is a lot to be said about the parallel economy one uses to move them back and forth long after they've fallen out of print, or that I distinctly remember passages from dystopian novels where characters would cradle computer screens and pine meaningfully for the days of paper books.

Even aside from any psychological or superstitious reasons to value books over e-readers (which are especially ridiculous from someone who claims that Content is king), the e-readers have the same practical problems that make me wary when it comes to other electronics. If I drop my book at the beach, I'm a little disappointed because my book is soggy. At worst, I have to replace it with another copy. If I drop my e-reader in the water, my whole library is obliterated. To paraphrase Jerry Holkins: "It's as if you murdered all your favorite authors." Obviously it's recoverable in theory, but that's what they said about my iTunes music before my laptop caught fire. My house is significantly less prone to catching fire and falling to ruin than any electronic device I've ever seen, and I've never accidentally mislaid my entire collection of A Series of Unfortunate Events while changing terminals at LAX.

My point is that all the convenience of an e-book, well sold to me by the group discussing it, vanishes with my proclivity for losing such an device. And the cost benefit isn't there--even if books were significantly cheaper with a Kindle, I simply don't deal frequently enough in them to justify the purchase of a $140 device. Ignoring textbooks, I have purchased approximately forty books for my reading pleasure in the last four years. Most of them were graphic novels, but all of them were purchased to be shared. Hell, when I was in High School I ran a small psuedo-library loaning graphic novels to friends.

So I think I'll stick to my codex for a while, thank you kindly.

Ruth Brown

McCarthyism is a weird thing to think about because the paranoia that's inherent in it seems so frivolous now, but only because we've seen it, experienced it. However, the belief that we've beaten it is pervasive and should be ignored--after all, with the Patriot Act I think we're still fighting Ruth Brown's fight.

I enjoy reading about spunky librarians that stand up for the freedom of their patrons and protect the information in their libraries, but hearing about it and the pervasiveness of anti-Communist actions in the States (and considering the ways that the Red Scare continues to influence public policy), I guess I'm a little curious about people who wouldn't get (and perhaps don't deserve) their own book.

The librarians who gave in and let their libraries open to the jackals. They definitely existed--after all, Ruth's story wouldn't be half as interesting if it was just a description of the behavior of librarians during the middle of the century. So what was going through these people's heads as they sacrificed their libraries to sickle-hungry jackal? Who were they? What did we lose as a result of their actions?

This warrants some investigation.

Better Homes and Libraries

I'm a Terry Pratchett fan. Not a big fan; although I've been familiar with his works for years I'd been exposed to several of his books unawares and I'm just now becoming familiar with the effect one of his books had on my developing sense of aesthetic. In the book--I don't remember which one--an early scene takes place in a library, with rows of books stacked across shelves so innumerable they may be quantum entangled with every other row of stacks everywhere in the multiverse. The power the books have is so strong it must be contained, and whispers along bronze chains. Libraries are described as places of supreme power, and this particular library has a collection whose knowledge generates tidal forces that shift reality unpredictably and have turned the local librarian into an orangutan. Undaunted by his transmogrification, he continues to traverse the vastness of his arcane pocket universe.

This was the image that rollicked through my brain when I first entered Memorial Library, and it's the reason that in my mind the musty book dungeon is the only proper library I've ever encountered. I swear the shelving rearranges itself while you're not looking, and the stairs don't always lead to the same floors. A narrow hallway becomes that much more vast when the walls are bookshelves.

The book fetish is understandable amongst a group of people whose profession has long been guardians of those books, from a time when the book and its content were analogous. As that becomes less true, we see a shift towards digital content. Digital content means more freedom as works can iterate faster, can wheel more freely. In a profession obsessed with making information accessible, it seem strange that instantly searchable, broadly available digital documents wouldn't be welcomed. I'd expect them to be met as old friends, or likeminded allies, lionized and glorified in verse and song.

It can't merely be the aesthetic pleasure of creeping through a hallway densely packed with the desecrated corpses of trees, but still, the thought of libraries turning into rec rooms with goofy little furniture and "futuristic" decor that will look hopelessly dated in ten years feels adequately bleak, even as their ability to serve that patron increases.

Maybe my thinly veiled contempt for the masses who become patrons is coloring my vision a little.

Copyright Abuse

I've been known to get a little handsy with copyrighted material sometimes, I admit it, and I think it makes me a bad person.

Owning ideas is always problematic for me, because I consider myself a creator of sorts. It's weird for me to come up with an idea and find out someone already had a similar idea, because it automatically forces me to defend my creative output, even if my idea was completely independent of the idea I might be criticized for stealing. I'm still a newb, an amateur, too, so I value people using my ideas as long as I get to see them externalized. I want people to take my ideas, frequently because I have more ideas than I have the talent, ambition, or interest to execute. Just the other day I had an idea for an mp3 player shaped like a wristwatch, which I feel could be tremendously well received with the right demographic. Take my idea, please!

Of course, I'm examining this from the weirdest position, and the wrong viewpoint--that of an owner of an idea, rather than a lessee, or whatever the technical term would be that describes a librarian's relationship to information in his collection. Working in document delivery you'd think issues with copyright would be obvious to me, but our policies make things murkier. We're not allowed to copy whole books for patrons but we don't keep a comprehensive list of patron requests and our services are mostly free, so it isn't impossible for patrons to request and keep PDFs of whole journals if they wanted.

They'd be abusing the system, but that seems like fairly obvious (if slightly convoluted) abuse and I don't know how it works out.