The Internet is arguably the greatest thing to happen to reading since the invention of the printing press (I can’t help myself – here I have to give credit to the Koreans, not the Germans, for their invention of the first metal printing press in 1377). While some detractors might rail against the fact that the Internet is changing the way that we read, it’s also true that efforts in digitization have forever changed (in a positive way) how we access that content.Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last seven or eight years, you’re likely aware that websites such as Google Books, the Gutenberg Project and the Infinite Archive (to name but a prominent few) have been working to digitize millions of books that have entered the public domain since they were originally published. Our Digital History assignment for this week is to peruse the books section of the Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue from 1913-1914, choose a half dozen books and attempt track down full online copies of them.
I decided to start my book search with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: the autobiography of a horse and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. My reasons for starting with these books were two-fold: first, I’ve always had a soft spot for classic children’s literature. Secondly, I have a sneaking suspicion that anything in the Western canon that has had its copyright protection expire is going to be relatively easy to find since, according to Choudhury et al., the more widely quoted the text, the more likely it is that a well-transcribed digital version exists.
Sure enough, Google Books returned a search for “Black Beauty” in 0.17 seconds, with the top result a full-view of its 1922 printing. A search for Carroll’s book was similarly simple. The novel was found easily enough in Google Books (as plain text only), but out of curiosity I also typed it into Google’s search engine just to see what I could come up with. Oddly, the second search result (even before that on Google Books) was for a full copy at Literature.org and the third was the complete text as found on Project Gutenberg’s website.
Still within the Western canon, my next book was Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Originally published in 1850, it was a snap to find a copy of an 1869 printing on Google Books. Presumably with a classic such as this, it would be just as easy to find it on a multitude of other websites as well.
After Dickens I decided to branch out and try to find some of the more obscure titles that were advertised in the Eaton’s Catalogue. I’d never heard of Rosa N. Carey’s Not Like Other Girls before, so I tried to look it up on Wikipedia to see if I could find a basic plot outline and original publish date. No such luck. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia doesn’t have this information available. But apparently this book isn’t nearly as obscure as I thought it was as I was able to find copies in Google Books, the Internet Archive and Open Library.
My fifth book was Robinson’s Book of Conundrums, a book that claims it’s a “veritable dispenser of cheerfulness and dispeller of the blues.” As much as I wanted to find this book, I couldn’t have done it if my life depended on it. A number of similarly titled books come up Google Books, but none that fit exactly. The search was made a bit more difficult by the fact that I was only able to make out the author’s last name (Allen) in the Eaton’s catalogue. Alas, maybe my blues just weren’t meant to be dispelled.
My sixth and final foray into the world of online books was to look for Fred T. Hodgson’s Modern Carpentry: A Practical Manual (Vol. 2) (1917). Despite (or maybe because of) being reprinted several times, only a snippet view is available of this book on Google Books. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, had links to two full-length digital copies of the book, one more effective than the other. The first version was plain text only, something that puzzled me a bit considering that a carpentry book without pictures and diagrams seems a little counter intuitive. But I.A. came through in the end and linked me to a page-by-page scanned version of the original text, diagrams and pictures included.
It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I love books. I like their look. I like their smell. Call me old-fashioned, but I like physically holding an object as I’m reading and being required to turn pages as I progress. In my day-to-day life I read a lot of content online, but I’m still somewhat of a sceptic when it comes to reading entire books using the Internet. It just doesn’t feel the same.
Having used the Google Books website before, I was relatively familiar with the site’s layout and the fact that their books are page-by-page scans where each page is presented individually to the reader who will then scroll through them “vertically” (for lack of a better word). With all of the money Google has to put into projects such as this, it isn’t surprising that their website has a slick, user-friendly design. That said, I still feel as if there is something missing from the reader’s experience when I view content in this format. Project Gutenberg’s “read online” option is positively stark in comparison to Google Books’ flashier site. It still allows you view pages individually, but its plain text approach is perhaps just a little too plain for my liking; it feels a little soulless.
Open Library, on the other hand, is positively “homey” in comparison to the other two sites. It doesn’t seem to have the same selection as some of the bigger websites in terms of number of titles available, but I enjoyed that they’ve designed their scans to look like real books. Readers get to see two pages presented side-by-side and animation gives the effect that you are flipping through the pages just as you would in a real book. On top of that you still get the visuals like wear and tear, stains on a page and writing in the margins that you would from any well-loved print book. This format was definitely friendlier to this user.
Still, it’s not the same.
And it’s because it’s not the same that I don’t think that ebooks and the digitization of existing books are going to make print books obsolete any time soon. They may eventually, but I doubt that it’s anything I need to be afraid of seeing in my lifetime. But who knows, as quickly as technology is moving, I may be eating my words by 2050. Of course, by then they’d be nothing more than words on a computer screen, so eating them might prove rather difficult.
