babiegoose.com

just this very moment, I realized that I like reading from books. That is assuming that I am trying to read pages at a time - or rather, I like reading off pages.

here's the problem - I'm a big fan of searching through text. obviously, it is much harder to search through text manually than if you had computer do it. So I'm a big fan of computers doing searching through text.

I guess the best way to alleviate this problem is to scan every single known book so that the text and captions can be searchable and store it electronically.

I'm sure that this is being done for a number of books, but I don't think they are doing it for all textual material.

do you realize the implications of that?

first, we could store it somewhere on the web, in a format that cannot be easily altered (so we don't have an editing or version control problem)

second, we wouldn't have to traverse the country for a specific tome, or better we could share information between schools.

third, we could bankrupt publishing companies and the manual spell and grammar checkers (although I would assume that some manual process would have to be done as no automated process is entirely perfect) - but not that this is a good thing...

but the problem would be that you would run into the whole digital information infringing upon profits of the companies that make them - so sell subscriptions - $10 a month for unlimited access or $1 per MB downloaded or something like that...

another problem would be to get all of the text into a digital text format - it would be especially hard for eariler works, and if there were hand written documents, any hidden messages could potentially be lost...

there are probably bunches of other issues with this whole thing, not to mention money and storage space, and maintenance, security, and retrieval times and what not...

plus, I think the the scanning process could destroy certain volumes since the book would have to be taken apart in some cases to scan it.

but books can't last forever, and I heard somewhere that if something makes in on the net - it is virtually indestructible.

think about it, with wireless technology exploding, how cool would it be to bring up any page from a book in a moment's notice. people would be able to quote authors directly, follow procedures, etc...

once you get all the books in history input into the database of books all that would be left would be each and every book that came out every day, and how hard can that be? :-P

plus, we would have the added benefit of removing from the historical record all of the bad books ever written...
:-P

::: ::: :::

In the defense of keeping paper books, having a library would be neat... you know, the big ones with the huge books and the rolling ladders and the leather winged chairs with a huge fire place and nice rugs and curving stairs...

of course, that requires money too...

and it's a bit frivolous.