The library beyond the book

With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive--although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library's history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels. Libraries have always been mix-and-match spaces, and remix is their most plausible future scenario. Speculative and provocative, The Library Beyond the Book explains book culture for a world where the physical and the virtual blend with ever increasing intimacy.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member dono421846

If you believe Amazon is the model of the library of the future, this is the book for you. Everyone else will be frustrated by the authors' misunderstanding of what a library actually is. Much of the book builds upon their assumption that libraries are mere accumulations an dispensers of texts, and

that the interesting developments of the future will be how much of this can be converted to digital formats, or how to apply the warehouse storage and retrieval technologies of Amazon. Those are indeed questions, but finding the appropriate answers requires a deep understanding of what a library is. Unfortunately, neither author has any practical familiarity with libraries, although they do write about them a great deal, and by all accounts count themselves as fans and supporters. But they have nothing more than an outsider's view of what the library, as institution, actually is. Both are members of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which collectively (with their colleague, John Palfrey) has inadvertently done much to undermine the value of libraries qua libraries rather than as information dumps, and of librarians. Although Harvard possesses one of the great legacy libraries of the nation, the university has adopted a policy that libraries are too important to be run by actual librarians. Librarians are adequate as functionaries, but major decisions must be made by dilettantes like Berkman Center members who have no actual experience in library administration. If they are serious about thinking the big thoughts about libraries, they should have fewer Internet geeks and law professors, and add some real librarians to its list of directors. Otherwise they'll continue to produce manifestos like this book, full of spirit and energy, but with little actual connection to libraries rather than to the delivery of texts (not the same thing).

That said, the book is well intended if naive, and does contain a few snippets of interesting observations. The writing style is a bit bombastic and overdone. Sentences should rarely go on for six lines, but that seems to be the norm here.

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LibraryThing member culturion

This book does a fantastic job of tearing up the old cultural map by exposing the assumptions we make when we categorise something as ‘library’ or ‘book', opening up connections, excavating the whole cultural process of authorship, readership and exchange and testing the limits of what

libraries and books can be. It’s playful, poetic and provocative.

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