On the future of bound books and libraries

Copyright by H. Vernon Leighton

[The reason I am claiming copyright is because I am planning to eventually
publish this as an article, once I have done more research, but I thought
that the online community ought to have a first peek.]

In November of last year, I attended a conference in St. Paul, Minnesota,
entitled "Reference Service: Dead or Alive?" The presenters were
provocative, and were trying to provoke their audience into coming up
with ideas with which to defend their profession. Below is an expanded
version of a comment that I gave from the audience.

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The paperless information society

Close your eyes and imagine a world in which there are no books. Texts of
all sorts are originally in electronic form. Now, because it seems true
that most people are uncomfortable reading long texts from a computer
screen, many people will want to print out the electronic text onto paper.
We see this today with items from the Internet, fulltext journal article
services, even microfilm.

So there is a great deal of printing.

Now, there are currently over five billion people on Earth, and we are
adding a hundred million a year. Barring some sort of holocaust, these
numbers will probably remain stable. We are world wide deforesting at a
rapid rate. While pro-timber advocates in this country have argued that
we have more forests now that at some previous time, that is certainly
not true of the Philippines, Sarawak, or Brazil. And I suspect that in
this country's silvaculture, we are not at a point where we are growing
as much as we are using.

So there is a limited amount of paper.

Paper prices will likely increase more, as they recently have. One does
not have to be a tree hugger (as the author thinks he is) to see the clear
economics. If the true cost of paper is passed to the user, which is often
not done currently, the cost of reading long texts (and by long, I mean over
two hundred pages) becomes burdensome.

What is the solution?

Sharing. If a text is popular, one person may print it out, and then share
it with other persons who are interested. Now I am a government documents
librarian, and most of our material comes paper bound or merely stapled
together. I know how quickly a text deteriorates after a few uses if it is
shared in a poorly bound state. What is the solution? Bind it in a hard cover,
that will repel some of the weather and random bumps of use.

Say that you have a community, like an academic community, that shares ideas
and with them long texts. What should they do? Congregate all those printed
out and bound texts together and put them on shelves. Now, to keep track of
them once the collection becomes large, they will have to catalog them and
classify them and hire people to develop, maintain and assist users with the
collection.

Therefore, in a world with no books or libraries, with only electronic texts,
hardbound books and libraries will reappear  out of economic considerations.
This says nothing about journal articles, etc., but the <EM>book</EM> is
likely to be with us for the long haul.

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Here I state some of the assumptions that need to be firmed up or proven
or explored before the about hypothetical becomes any sort of proof.

1. Is it true that most users cannot hack a two hundred plus page etext?
The same should be true of long microfilm texts.

2. If the scarcity of paper becomes truely great, will the basis of libraries
collapse also: people will steal the books from open stacks for the fiber
content. A black market of paper? Will the library of fifty years hence be
closed stacks and heavily patrolled, like the Library of Congress? With
photocopiers and pay computer printers watched so that users do not steal
the blank paper?

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I am not worried about the future existence of libraries or books, but I
worry about what they will be like and how common they will be. We shall
see.

Vernon

I would appreciate feedback and suggestions. If you help out with number one
above, I will acknowledge you when I get around to trying to publish this
in paper format.



H. Vernon Leighton
Government Documents Librarian
Winona State University
Winona MN 55987
(507) 457-5148
Leighton@winona.edu