5/4/98 U.S. News & World Rep. 60
1998 WL 8126689
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1998
Monday, May 4, 1998
Culture & Ideas
Books in cyberspace Why not create a national library online? The results could
be good for everyone; David H. Rothman (rothman@clark.net/www.teleread.org) is
author of NetWorld! (Prima, 1996)
David H. Rothman
Computers just don't cut it for beach or bathroom reading. But
imagine a computer shaped like a real book, complete with pages one
can flip, each embedded with programmable "type" that could
reproduce anything from a trigonometry text to The Great Gatsby.
Techies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently
trotted out a primitive prototype of a gadget that in the next five
years may do exactly that.
It's about time. Amazon.com notwithstanding, the Internet
is already siphoning off the money and time of some people who
might otherwise buy books. But what if the MIT gizmo and the Net
could help raise literary and educational standards and aid
publishers and writers along the way? A national library online
could offer free and enticing books from private publishers and
fairly reward copyright holders. Right now, public libraries can
scrounge up a measly $3 per capita for books. Writers earn perhaps
$5 billion to $6 billion annually from U.S. book royalties--less
than a third the amount by which Bill Gates grew richer in the
12-month period ending last summer.
Avoiding Big Brother. This is not to say Washington should
ape the old Soviet cultural bureaucracy and bestow grants on
political favorites. Instead, a tax-supported national library fund
could pay writers or publishers by their titles' popularity. Those
rejected could pay the fund to have their books included--gambling
that they would make the money back. What's more, librarians across
the country could help run this virtual library to avoid Big
Brotherish domination by the feds. Funding could be private as well
as public. People like Bill Gates, who has committed only about
half a percent of his $50 billion fortune to libraries, might take
the opportunity to become full-fledged Carnegies.
TeleRead, as the library might be called, could build on
existing efforts and enrich the Internet with material besides
books--educational software, for example. But please don't neglect
books, the best way to encourage sustained thought. And TeleRead
books ought not to be limited to children; we should also urge on
their No. 1 role models--parents.
Beyond supplying a true national library online, TeleRead
could, through guidelines or targeted government grants, encourage
schools and libraries to buy book-friendly computers. These small
machines could be tablet-style and sharp-screened, and electronic
pens could let you pick out chapters, browse the Web, or write
E-mail. Flippable pages of the MIT variety would just add to the
allure of TeleReaders. And so would the right talk from Al Gore or
Newt Gingrich. What's more, the school market could whet Silicon
Valley's interest and seed the retail market; parents eventually
could buy TeleReaders at Kmart for under $75.
With electronic pens and good handwriting recognition,
TeleReaders would also excel at E-forms and allow for
more-efficient dealings with the IRS or the corporate world. A bank
can save as much as 90 percent on a transaction made on the Net
instead of through a local branch. In our $7 trillion economy, the
popularization of E-forms could indirectly shift billions of
dollars from paperwork to books.
Simply put, books and bytes needn't war with each other.
With marvels like the MIT gizmo on the way, we can enjoy real books
in cyberspace.
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