Oxford’s Bodleian Library: Where Forests Go When They Die (h/t Michael Hart)
… the library also follows another traditional policy that is considerably more liberal: scholars from any university in the world are given free access to the library as readers, and those without a university affiliation can become readers by paying a nominal fee. The only stipulation is that all readers must swear this oath: I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.
One reason I love electronic books is in case Fahrenheit 451 becomes a reality. You scoff, but it’s getting pretty Orwellian in Oxford’s own nation.
Is it easier to burn a book or delete an electronic file? I’m not sure.
Come now. It is much easier to burn a book of which only one copy exists (especially at Oxford) than an electronic file which has been replicated and mirrored on millions of servers, personal computers and data drives worldwide.
I was thinking that electronic files (or the devices that read them) are subject to more interaction with a potential censor or agent of a censor. The code for a file has to be understood and diplayed in order to be useful. I’ll have to read up on how banned materials are spread in someplace like modern China to see how the kids are doing samizdat these days. I haven’t thought about this question in terms of political speech so much, more along the lines of abandoned technology and obsolete storage formats.
This is why Project Gutenberg insists that all of its eBooks are published as plain, vanilla ASCII, beyond the stranglehold of OS or reader-specific system. Also why proposals to “make fully public and readable,” say all the materials in the LoC, are laudable but scare me a bit b/c proprietary file formats are eventually useless and effectively remove material from the public domain. Related: Google books – images of books are not eBooks. When the end user has the ability to do whatever with the ASCII text, then the public really OWNS the book down to its last letter.