Update del libro y bibliotecas: análogos y digitales: el fantasma de un único libro vuelve a recorrer el mundo

Aquí, nos reporta Nicholas Carr, desde MIT Technology Review.

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1. Parece que el libro no se deja atrapar.
2. Parece que el libro reta toda convención de "titularlo" objeto, o bien cultural, o discurso, o lo que sea.
3. Parece que el verbo y el libro siguen SIENDO lo único que en verdad hemos CREADO.
4. Parece que el libro y el verbo, así, nos RESUMEN.
5. Parece que vamos a descubrir algo insospechado, desde las tecnologías para registrar y luego recuperar, discursos, verbo, los libros.

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Extracto introductorio:

"In his 1938 book World Brain, H.G. Wells imagined a time—not very distant, he believed—when every person on the planet would have easy access to "all that is thought or known."

The 1930s were a decade of rapid advances in microphotography, and Wells assumed that microfilm would be the technology to make the corpus of human knowledge universally available. "The time is close at hand," he wrote, "when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

Wells's optimism was misplaced. The Second World War put idealistic ventures on hold, and after peace was restored, technical constraints made his plan unworkable. Though microfilm would remain an important medium for storing and preserving documents, it proved too unwieldy, too fragile, and too expensive to serve as the basis for a broad system of knowledge transmission. But Wells's idea is still alive. Today, 75 years later, the prospect of creating a public repository of every book ever published—what the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer calls "the library of utopia"—seems well within our grasp. With the Internet, we have an information system that can store and transmit documents efficiently and cheaply, delivering them on demand to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. All that remains to be done is to digitize the more than 100 million books that have appeared since Gutenberg invented movable type, index their contents, add some descriptive metadata, and put them online with tools for viewing and searching.

It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant's book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors. And yet for all the project's strengths, its success is far from assured. Like Google before it, the DPLA is learning that the major problem with constructing a universal library nowadays has little to do with technology. It's the thorny tangle of legal, commercial, and political issues that surrounds the publishing business. Internet or not, the world may still not be ready for the library of utopia."